The Propulsion Model of Creative Contributions Applied to the Arts and Letters

This article applies a propulsion model of creative contributions to the arts and letters. The basic notion is that creative contributions differ not only in the amounts of creativity they display but also in the types of creative contributions they make. The article opens with a general discussion of creative contributions and next considers some existing models of creative contributions. It then describes the propulsion model for understanding creative contributions and suggests eight types of contributions that follow from the propulsion model. Next the article describes some contributions in the arts and letters and shows how the propulsion model can be applied to understanding them. Finally the article discusses why such a model can be useful in evaluating the status of creative work, of individuals, and of a domain.     

JOINING THE DISPUTATION: Taking Graham Seriously on Taking Chinese Thought Seriously

"…the understanding of Chinese philosophy depends …on philosophizing for oneself. Taking Chinese thought seriously is not simply a matter of acknowledging the rationality of some of it (and perhaps denying the name 'philosophy' to the rest), nor of discovering something valuable to oneself in the poetry of Lao-tzu ^a or the diagrams of the Yi. ^b Its study constantly involves one in important contemporary issues in moral philosophy, the philosophy and history of science, the deconstruction of established conceptual schemes, the problem of relating thought to linguistic structure, and correlative thinking to logic."¹
"To approach Chinese philosophy trusting to the dictionary and one's instinct for the language is to fail to take it altogether seriously, and the practice has been a perpetual drag on progress in discovering how much or how little that we call philosophyizing is actually there."²