Krausz awarded $750 TAA Publication Grant

Michael Krausz, professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, has been awarded a grant of $750 to cover a portion of the cost of compiling an index for his collective volume, The Idea of Creativity, edited by Krausz, Dennis Dutton and Karen Bardsley. The book will be published by Brill Publishers (Amsterdam and New York) in 2009.

"This TAA Publication Grant will be very helpful to me in recovering some of the costs of hiring a professional indexer," said Krausz.

TAA members can apply for a Publication Grant of up to $750 to cover the cost of publishing already accepted journal articles, or for the preparation of artwork or other charts, diagrams or images to be included in accepted articles or academic books. (Click for more info on grants)

Krausz's volume collects seventeen original and reprinted essays that address the intriguing question, "What is Creativity?" Part One asks: "What are the criteria for creativity?" "Should we assign logical priority to creative persons, creative processes, or creative products?" "Is creativity essentially mysterious?" "Can creativity be explained?" "If creativity is explainable, can it be explained naturalistically?" "Is creativity unpredictable?" "Is creativity goal-directed?" "What role does skill play in creativity?" "How does a creative product relate to medium and work?"

Part Two asks: "Is creativity essentially inspirational or rationalistic?" "How do intuition and awareness relate to creativity?" "What is the relation between creativity and habits of attention?" "How does creativity relate to self-transformation?" "How does creative activity relate to our place in the world?" "How does our knowledge of the circumstances of creativity effect our appreciation of its products?" And Part Three asks: "What forms of creativity are there?" "How do forms of creativity relate to different domains of human activity?" "How do creative scientists make phenomena intelligible?" "Can a reader of a creative literary work, for example, also be a creator of it?" "Rather than adding something to the world, does creativity involve subtracting something from the world?" The essays propound differing views, urge contrasting emphases, and reflect diverse philosophical idioms.

Krausz is the Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. Trained at the Universities of Toronto and Oxford, he has been visiting professor at Georgetown University, Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, American University in Cairo, University of Nairobi, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, University of Ulm, and others.

Krausz is the author of Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices (Cornell University Press), 1993; Varieties of Relativism, with Rom Harré (Basil Blackwell Publishers), 1995; Limits of Rightness (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), 2000; and Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and the Self (Rodopi Publishers), 2006. He is also contributing editor of several works. Krausz is the co-founder and former chair of the thirteen-institution Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium. In 1997 Krausz was awarded the Hans Kupczyk Prize from the University of Ulm. In 2001 the University of Delhi sponsored a four-day international conference on his philosophical work. In 2003 a festschrift dedicated to Krausz's work, entitled Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz, was edited by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and published by Rodopi Publishers.