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This book deals with the theme of creativity in the animal world, conceived as a basic function for adapting to specific situations and as a source of innovations and inventions. Creativity is a fundamental resource for the individual who always has a leading role in conduct. To explain creativity, The Creative Animal focuses on the concept of animal subjectivity, providing a new explanatory model of behaviour capable of overcoming the image of the animal moved by automatisms. This model does not use consciousness as a necessary condition, but is based: 1) on affective components, such as behavioral motives, and 2) cognitive, as tools used by the subject to carry out his purposes. Particular attention is paid to the learning processes showing the subjective character of the experience. One topic addressed is the role of creativity in the evolution of living beings: how an invention, by modifying the niche characteristics, is able to change the selective pressures and the trajectory of phylogeny. Roberto Marchesini explains that creativity is a factor that is anything but rare or exceptional in the animal world-it constitutes a fundamental quality for many aspects of animal life.
Chapter 1 - In praise of improvisation
Chapter 2 - On subjectivity
Chapter 3 - Having interests to defend
Chapter 4 - It is not possible to just repeat
Chapter 5 - Equipment as tools to be used
Chapter 6 - Perceiving means building
Chapter 7 - Build your niche and address phylogeny
Chapter 8 - It is not always anthropomorphism
Chapter 9 - Leadership in learning
Chapter 10 - Plural intelligences
Chapter 11 - The inevitable lightness of culture
Chapter 12 - All colors of consciousness
Roberto Marchesini is Director of School of Human-Animal Interactions and the Center for the Study of Posthumanist Philosophy, both based in Bologna, Italy.
