ABSTRACT

In the last several decades, the attempt to understand the nature of creation and created things has become a central and collective intellectual project. The energy that in an earlier age was directed toward the investigation of “truth” has been redirected toward understanding the nature of inventing, making, creating (or, as it has often been referred to lately, “constructing,” especially in the sense of “the social construction of x”). This project is young enough, and the outlines of its possibilities are rich enough, that it could go in many directions; but certainly, at a minimum, both the phenomenological attributes of creation and the ethical entailments of creation are centrally at issue.