In our new series of short, introductory courses on Continental philosophy, we explore the foundations of philosophical thinking through a central idea. We learn how to formulate philosophical questions, explore diverse philosophical positions, and unpack the fundamental problems and concepts that have shaped contemporary European thought.​

 

Our inaugural course revolves around one of the most captivating and mysterious concepts in modern life: creativity. What does it mean to be creative? Where do new ideas come from? The demand for creativity is everywhere, from schools and universities to corporations and governments. What can philosophy offer here, and how can it intervene in this modern obsession?​

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With the rapid rise of AI, the stakes surrounding this question have never been higher. We are told that our creative capacity is what distinguishes us from machines, and that it might save our jobs, our culture, and perhaps even our humanity. But can we explain the emergence of something genuinely new? If creativity is the birth of the unprecedented, can we understand it without addressing it as pure magic?​

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This six-week course introduces continental philosophy through the question of creativity. Through Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, we will explore what it means to create a work of art, develop an idea or give a new direction to life. These activities raise questions about imagination, freedom, desire and our relationship with the world, giving us a way into several of the central problems of modern European thought.

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We will examine how ideas take shape through materials, bodily habits and experiences whose significance we do not fully control or even understand, and consider how creativity depends on learning, repetition and constraint. We will explore what distinguishes different types of creativity - artistic creation, scientific invention and technological innovation, and how each changes what we see and understand in the world.

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Kant distinguishes originality, skill and artistic invention, so that a work can be unusual without being interesting, and technically accomplished without opening up anything new. We will explore his account of creativity as a capacity whose achievements cannot be produced simply by following a rule. How can an original work become an example from which others learn?

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Nietzsche extends the question of artistic creation into the conduct of everyday life. His proposal to give style to our character involves working with our strengths, weaknesses and habits over time. We will examine the relationship between self-creation, discipline and perspective, asking how far we can transform the ways we experience and evaluate our lives. What can we learn from artists about attending to even the most ordinary aspects of existence?

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Through Merleau-Ponty, we will explore the question of creativity as a bursting force generating unprecedented effects. We will examine how art can give expression to an experience even when the artist does not fully grasp or control the idea beforehand. This introduces phenomenology through a concrete question: how does our physical encounter with the world participate in what we create?

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Deleuze asks what it means to have an idea and express it specifically - in art, science, politics, film, and more. A filmmaker's idea takes shape through the way images and sounds unfold in time, while a scientist's idea through the measuring of a phenomenon. We will examine what actually happens when an idea strikes, and explore how ideas are never abstract. Instead, they are specific, concrete, and fundamentally inseparable from the mediums used to express them.

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