Steve Humbert-Droz: Smart Creativity

Tuesday May 5 2026 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
In philosophy, creativity, and especially creative thinking (as opposed to creative achievements), is often associated with imagination. Even scholars who deny a substantive connection between creativity and imagination typically take this association as their starting point. In psychology, by contrast, creative thinking is more frequently associated with intelligence.

In this talk, I show that creative thinking can be better understood through its relationship with intelligence than with imagination. I argue that the dominant imaginative view – according to which a minimal form of imagination is a necessary component of creativity (Carruthers 2002, 2006; Gaut 2003; Hills & Bird 2019; Stokes 2014) – fails to provide a non-trivial account of creative thinking. 

I then defend a competing but structurally similar hypothesis, which I call smart creativity: some relevant broad abilities of intelligence (associated with expertise) are necessary components of creative thinking and constitute a major explanatory factor of it (Silvia 2015; Stevenson et al. 2021).

This view sheds light on the specific kind of praise we attribute to individuals who go “outside the box” – that is, those who perform creative achievements through creative thinking, as opposed to individuals whose creative achievements result from other processes.

Bio

Steve Humbert-Droz is a postdoctoral fellow at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with a grant from the Swiss Confederation. His current project concerns the relationship between imagination and intelligence and the taxonomy of these concepts. His other interests are aesthetics, emotions, and imaginative states – such as mental imagery or imaginative immersion.