Philosophy Conferences and Calls for Papers

Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France

Established in the Institut Jean Nicod, an interdisciplinary lab interface between the humanities and the cognitive sciences, ARTS and NEUROSCIENCES REVIEW presents articles, discussions, news, forums and reviews inspired by current research from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, social cognition and philosophy of mind. It provides an essential overview of contemporary debates and theories about art -its practice, its products and the experiences it brings about.

Editor in chief: Emmanuelle Glon

Call for Papers

Creativity, as it is currently admitted, refers to the process of generating new ideas, beyond the mere application of previous or older established schemata. It is sometimes called “Eureka!” experience, as the quintessential attribute of profane illumination and intuitive insight, resulting from an environmental and methodological “tabula rasa.” In a weaker sense, creativity is the faculty of recombining ideas by moving away from the direct constraints of the environment – physical, social, cultural, etc. Scientific literature currently mentions it under the term of “divergent thought”, namely the thought capable of associating in a unusual way a corpus of ideas, methods and perspectives involved in problem- solving. In this respect, a creative thought is not just part of the artist’s properties even though creativity seems to have been attained more fully with artists who are widely accepted as geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Shakespeare or Mozart. There are probably degrees of creativity. However polyphonic the concept of creativity may appear, it seems that creative thought involves, as its basic unit, our capacity to extract ourselves from factual regularity, immediate contexts, environmental stimuli or social normativity. On this view, imagination appears as an active component, if not the very implementation of the creative thought. If imagination is indeed the key capacity to consider situations, concepts and actions in the hypothetical mode, as it were, that is, elements which are not being currently sensed or physically enacted, how being creative if not imaginatively? Creative thinking then amounts to bringing into existence through imagination something new and innovative.

After a long period of excommunication from the part of scientific community, imagination is now poised to benefit from an ingenious and fruitful combinations of theories and methodes stemming various disciplines, such as scientific psychology, neurology, ethology, biology and philosophy, generating new ideas and concepts outside the current disciplinary boundaries. With this theoretical and methodological exchange between research fields, imagination and creativity gain both a scientific anchoring and stimulus for the implementation of empirical research models to evaluate the effectiveness of these concepts in informational and neurological substract. The development in the field of cognitive neuroscience of techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to visualize changes in the chemical composition of brain areas during thought processes, provides powerful source of insights into the neural correlate of the imaginative abilities.

In this context, the development of experimental approaches and the dynamics of theoretical reflexion about mental consciousness and mind development may contribute to radically changing the potential role currently attributed to imagination as proper to artistic activity.

Additional Information and Submission Details

Papers should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding bibliographical references, including footnotes) and should be submitted together with a short abstract of approximately 200 words.

Accepted papers will appear on the website and will be published also as a special Issue about Arts and Neurosciences.

Electronic submissions should be sent as attachments to BOTH of the following addresses:

emma2006@arts-neurosciences.org
landart05@yahoo.fr

Institut Jean Nicod,
Arts and Neurosciences Review
1 bis avenue Lowendal,
75007 Paris
France