The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to the individual domain of the creative agent. More recently, however, researchers have begun to develop perspectives on creativity that highlight the patterns of adaptive embodied interaction that occur between multiple agents, as well as the broader socio-material milieu they are situated in. This has promoted new understandings of creativity, which is now often considered as a distributed phenomenon. Because music involves such a wide range of socio-cultural, bodily, technological, and temporal dimensions it is increasingly taken as a paradigmatic example for researchers who wish to explore creativity from this more relational perspective. In this article, we aim to contribute to this project by discussing musical creativity in light of recent developments in embodied cognitive science. More specifically, we will attempt to frame an approach to musical creativity based in an 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) understanding of cognition. We suggest that this approach may help us better understand creativity in terms of how interacting individuals and social groups bring forth worlds of meaning through shared, embodied processes of dynamic interactivity. We also explore how dynamical systems theory (DST) may offer useful tools for research and theory that align closely with the 4E perspective. To conclude, we summarize our discussion and suggest possibilities for future research.

Key words: 4e cognition, dynamical systems theory, embodied cognition, improvisation, musical creativity

Context: The short history of the reception of the philosophy of non-dualism in science is a history of misunderstandings and cursory reception – the latter especially concerns Mitterer’s main work Das Jenseits der Philosophie (The Beyond of Philosophy, which still has not been translated into English). Non-dualism so far is mostly seen either as a kind of constructivism replacing the rhetoric of “construction” with a rhetoric of “description” or as an overall philosophical critique of the use of dualisms, dichotomies or polarities in epistemological contexts. The core arguments of non-dualism are often completely ignored. This paper wishes to discuss them precisely and draw some conclusions. Approach: Close critical reading of Mitterer’s texts, trying to avoid as many translation gaps as possible. Findings: Non-dualism reveals the infinite regress of classical philosophy of language: the categorical differentiation between language and the world leads to a systematic contradiction. While non-dualism also helps to deconstruct the pretension to speak “about reality” or to claim that “in fact” something is the case in everyday life, non-dualism refrains from giving satisfying answers to the great questions of mankind in the “metaphysical” context: questions of starting points/origins, meanings, causes, and the (implicitness of the) time arrow. Benefits: The intention of this paper is to stimulate a broader discussion – so far limited by language – extending it beyond German and Polish scientific circles.

Key words: language/object, realism-constructivism controversy, Mitterer’s indication of the object (“Objektangabe”), Wittgenstein’s aspect seeing (“Aspektsehen”), arrow of time

Constructivist approaches are met with growing interest in the field of psychology In this paper, three variants of constructivism will be dealt with (1) the individual-centred constructivism of the theory of personal constructs proposed by George Kelly, (2) radical constructivism in the sense of Ernst von Glasersfeld and Heinz von Foerster, and (3) social constructionism as represented by Ken Gergen This paper outlines the theory of personal constructs as the first subject-theoretical and constructivist approach in psychology, considers the reasons for the rather ambiguous reception of radical constructivism in psychology, and explains why social constructionism can be seen as the most promising variant of constructivism today by presenting two examples the social construction of psychological disorders and the social construction of creativity The central question about the empirical content of psychological theories is answered from a social-constructionist point of view The conclusion is that empirical research in psychology remains possible and useful Finally, recent critical comments concerning the extension of social constructionism to the natural sciences are briefly discussed.