If art and science have one thing in common, it's a hunger for the
new-new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the
world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental
philosophical problem: If everything has to come from something,
how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible? In
Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two
millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the
puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the
1960s and '70s. The terms of the debate, North shows, were
established before Plato, and have changed very little since:
novelty, philosophers argued, could only arise from either
recurrence or recombination. The former, found in nature's cycles
of renewal, and the latter, seen most clearly in the workings of
language, between them have accounted for nearly all the ways in
which novelty has been conceived in Western history, taking in
reformation, renaissance, invention, revolution, and even
evolution. As he pursues this idea through centuries and across
disciplines, North exhibits astonishing range, drawing on figures
as diverse as Charles Darwin and Robert Smithson, Thomas Kuhn and
Ezra Pound, Norbert Wiener and Andy Warhol, all of whom offer
different ways of grappling with the idea of originality. Novelty,
North demonstrates, remains a central problem of contemporary
science and literature-an ever-receding target that, in its
complexity and evasiveness, continues to inspire and propel the
modern. A heady, ambitious intellectual feast, Novelty is rich with
insight, a masterpiece of perceptive synthesis.
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