Mind, Thinking and Creativity

Global civilization is the product of diverse cultures, each contributing a unique perspective arising from the development of different mental faculties and powers of mind. The momentous achievements of modern science are the result of the cumulative development of mind’s capacity for analytic thinking, mathematical rendering and experimental validation. The near-exclusive preoccupation with analysis, universal laws, mechanism, materialism, and objective experience over the past two centuries has shaped the world we live in today, accounting both for its accomplishments and its insoluble problems. Today humanity confronts complex challenges that defy solution by piecemeal analysis, unidimensional theories, and fragmented strategies. Poverty, unemployment, economic crisis, fundamentalism, violence, climate change, war, refugees, reflect the limitations and blindspots that have resulted from a partial, one-sided application of the diverse capacities of the human mind. Human monocultures suffer from all the limitations as their biological counterparts. There is urgent need to revive the legitimacy of synthetic, organic and integrated modes of thinking, to restore the credibility of subjective self-experience in science, to reaffirm the place of symbol, analogy and metaphor as valid ways of knowing and communication in education, to recognize the unique role of the individual in social processes, to recognize the central role of insight and intuition in science as in art. This article examines themes presented at the WAAS-WUC course on Mind, Thinking and Creativity, conducted at Dubrovnik in April 2016