ABSTRACT
What is it for an action to be creative? The standard thought is that it must issue in something new and valuable (Gaut and Livingston 2003: 8; Gaut 2009: 1039–1041; Kieran 2014a: 126; Paul and Kaufman 2014: 6). This is often motivated by Kant’s thought (2000: 5, 308, 186) that original nonsense is insufficient for creativity. I may produce an essay which is novel because it is so trivial and incoherent. To count as creative an essay must be novel in a way that realizes something valuable, such as insight or explanatory power. This is the dominant view, though there are dissenters (Hills and Bird 2018). It is also common to advert to Boden’s distinction between psychological and historical creativity (2004: 2, 40–53). According to Boden, an act is psychologically creative if and only if someone produces something valuable, surprising, and new to herself (note the added surprise condition). An act is historically creative if and only if it is psychologically creative and it is the first time this has been done in human history.
