Imagination and Creative Thinking

This Element explores the nature of both imagination and creative thinking in an effort to understand the relation between them and also to understand their role in the vast array of activities in which they are typically implicated from art music and literature to technology medicine and science. Focusing on the contemporary philosophical literature it will take up several interrelated questions: What is imagination and how does it fit into the cognitive architecture of the mind? What is creativity? Is imagination required for creativity? Is creativity required for imagination? Is a person simply born either imaginative or not (and likewise either creative or not) or are imagination and creativity skills that can be cultivated? And finally are imagination and creativity uniquely human capacities or can they be had by nonbiological entities such as AI systems?