Creativity, skill, and achievement

Creativity and creative products are generally understood to have a distinct value. Problems of creativity, or recognizable analogues, find discussions as early as Plato. Nevertheless, questions remain unresolved on the cross-situational, typically persisting creativity predicated of agents — particularly on its metaphysics, why it and its products command praise and esteem, and if it is aesthetically relevant in art appreciation. This work approaches these topics by elaborating and developing the received philosophical account of agential creativity via the concept of skill. Accordingly, and after disposing several theories not placed to capture the concept at stake, Chapter 1 gives a detailed exposition of the received view of creativity as non-accidental generation of new and valuable material. It then highlights aspects of the account most needing elaboration, and prospects of doing so through appeal to skill. To that end, Chapter 2 despatches some unworkable theories of skill, then presenting its own detailed account. Chapter 3 establishes agential creativity fits the profile of a skill so described, and addresses worries over realizability. With a more detailed account of creativity in hand, Chapter 4 turns to appreciation, rejecting Aesthetic Empiricism, an influential view by which the appreciation of art is closely circumscribed by direct experiential encounter of the art object to the exclusion of skill and creativity. The reply elaborates reasons to reject the Empiricist conception of art relevance, but sustains the thought all aesthetic qualities are experienced. Chapter 5 shows how skill and creativity can be aesthetically relevant within these constraints. Chapter 6 turns to value, arguing via the notion of achievement agential creativity and its products have conditional final value. Chapter 7 raises creativity as predicated of groups, proving this is not always reducible to the creativity of agents, before extending the metaphysical, normative and appreciative arguments to the group case.