Several works published in the last decades defend the claim that the concept of creativity should be demystified. With the aim of showing that creativity is not an obscure power owned by only few individuals and free from constraints, authors working at the intersection field between philosophy and cognitive science have notably focused on the structure and evolution of cognitive mechanisms underlying our creative capacities. While taking up the suggestion that we should try not to mystify creativity, this article argues (...) that what is required for such demystification is primarily a transcendental and phenomenological inquiry. Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are here discussed in order to develop such a transcendental inquiry into creativity. Both Kant and Merleau-Ponty bring to the fore the conditions of possibility for creative acts, and highlight fundamental role of creativity itself in the formation of meaningfulness. The keystone of both philosophers’ inquiries is the emphasis on the interdependence between creativity and rules. Yet, due to the different approaches to the transcendental, Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts do not fully converge, but should rather be considered as complementary. (shrink)

In our view, the way of thinking involved in insight problem solving is very close to the process involved in the understanding of an utterance, when a misunderstanding occurs. In this case, a more appropriate meaning has to be selected to resolve the misunderstanding , the default interpretation has to be dropped in order to “restructure”, to grasp another meaning which appears more relevant to the context and the speaker's intention. A new conception of unconscious, implicit thought emerges, informed by (...) relevance. In this article we support our view with experimental evidence, focusing on how a misunderstanding is formed. We have explored two problems, in which a trivial arithmetical task is represented as an insight problem and vice versa. Studying how an insight problem is formed, and not just how it is solved, may well become an important topic in the contemporary debate on thought. (shrink)

Je cherche ici à renouveler la compréhension de l’esthétique merleau-pontienne en lisant les notes de son premier cours au Collège de France, « Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression ». Ce faisant, on peut voir certains films de Godard comme prolongeant la réflexion du philosophe, éclairer le rapport de Deleuze à la phénoménologie et enfin resituer Merleau-Ponty dans le contexte des pratiques artistiques contemporaines. La portée de cette phénoménologie du mouvement dépasse cependant le cadre de l’esthétique dans la (...) mesure où elle laisse entrevoir une solution au problème du passage du perceptif au conceptuel. (shrink)