Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 195.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 09:59:38 +0100
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: 14.0190 solving the problem of creative genius
From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Tues. Aug. 22, 2000 6:20AM
Dear Colleagues:
I am so happy that somebody has finally taken up my co-thread, so to speak,
that I restrain my amusement concerning Jim Marchand's comments. I can just
visualize somebody telling Beethoven: "That has all been tried before," or
telling Milton: "But we need a definition." There is, admittedly, an
amount of truth in all or most humor. Nevertheless, it is especially
amusing to list "interdisciplinary" as a characteristic of creative genius
and then to be criticized for crossing the boundary of the humanities into
science/mathematics. I had planned to return with a detailed theoretical
analysis of the categories, and I especially want to thank Jim Marchand for
a remarkable opportunity to return with definitions, theory, explanations,
which will take me some time. I did anticipate that someone familiar with
old time intelligence tests (and some newer tests in psychology and social
sciences) would think first of those often criticized tests when seeing my
fingerprint suggestions, but I did not realize how interesting the reaction
would be. Since I am leaving for a short trip Thursday, readers should
restrain their enthusiasm until I return, unless I find time to create a
brief pearl of wisdom before then. Who knows? It is even possible.
Osher Doctorow
----- Original Message -----
From: "Humanist Discussion Group
<willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>)" <willard@lists.village.virginia.edu>
To: "Humanist Discussion Group" <humanist@lists.Princeton.EDU>
Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 11:05 PM
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 190.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
> <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
> <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
>
>
>
> Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 06:59:29 +0100
> From: "Jim Marchand" <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
> Subject: Re: 14.0188 market truth, fingerprint machine
>
> On the problem of creative genius -- one would suppose first that one
would
> need a definition. One would then need a list of people on which we could
> obtain general consensus that they were indeed creative geniuses. Perhaps
> also a profiling method which would exclude those who were idiots savants
or
> creative in a non-humanistic field, e.g. mathematics. Then one would need
> some method for deciding the characteristics to be polled. This has all
> been tried before, mais est-ce cela vaut la chandelle?
>
>
>
>
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