Can the mind produce genuinely new material ex nihilo? Last week I was reading a bit of philosophy out of a used textbook and someone had written in the margins a note about “creativity” of the mind. That got me to thinking.

Do we use the word “creativity” loosely, however unwittingly? Do all the supposedly novel images we find, for instance, in literature derive from and have their basis in things that have come before? I have always tended not to think so: but rather that the mind can conceive of things that have not come before, things or ideas which are completely unique. [1] David Hume, of course, would [2] disagree. But would I, too, now?

Perhaps it’s a synthesis of things. There is an element of genuine creativity involved in the synthesis and transcension of that which has come before. So we can say that Tolkien’s [3] Lord of the Rings series, for instance, was genuinely creative, even though many of his ideas came from North-Western European mythologies and from Catholicism.

I want to know [4] what you think.

Can the mind produce genuinely new material ex nihilo? Last week I was reading a bit of philosophy out of a used textbook and someone had written in the margins a note about “creativity” of the mind. That got me to thinking.

Do we use the word “creativity” loosely, however unwittingly? Do all the supposedly novel images we find, for instance, in literature derive from and have their basis in things that have come before? I have always tended not to think so: but rather that the mind can conceive of things that have not come before, things or ideas which are completely unique. [5] David Hume, of course, would [6] disagree. But would I, too, now?

Perhaps it’s a synthesis of things. There is an element of genuine creativity involved in the synthesis and transcension of that which has come before. So we can say that Tolkien’s [7] Lord of the Rings series, for instance, was genuinely creative, even though many of his ideas came from North-Western European mythologies and from Catholicism.

I want to know [8] what you think.