The Act of Creation

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Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 1964 - Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) - 751 pages
Astudy of the processes of discovery, invention, imagination and creativity in humor, science, and the arts. It lays out Koestler's attempt to develop an elaborate general theory of human creativity. From describing and comparing many different examples of invention and discovery, Koestler concludes that they all share a common pattern which he terms "bisociation"--A blending of elements drawn from of two previously unrelated matrices of thought into a new matrix of meaning by way of a process involving comparison, abstraction and categorization, analogies and metaphors. He regards many different mental phenomena based on comparison (such as analogies, metaphors, parables, allegories, jokes, identification, role-playing, acting, personification, anthropomorphism etc.), as special cases of "bisociation".

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Contents

IV
27
V
51
VI
64
Copyright

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About the author (1964)

Arthur Koestler was born on September 5, 1905 in Budapest, Hungary and studied at the University of Vienna. Koestler was a Middle East correspondent for several German newspapers, wrote for the Manchester Guardian, the London Times and the New York Herald Tribune. Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, which centers on the destructiveness of politics, The Act of Creation, a book about creativity, and The Ghost in the Machine, which bravely attacks behaviorism. Arthur Koestler died in London on March 3, 1983.

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