Novelty

The question of causality has haunted the history of Western metaphysics since the time of the Pre-Socratic philosophy. Hand-in-hand with attempts to address this question is the promise of unlocking larger and more complicated questions pertaining to human freedom. But what of novelty? In this brilliant extended essay Donald A. Crosby contends that though novelty can't be comprehended without efficient causality, causality requires a concept of novelty; without it cause and effect relations are unintelligible and, indeed, impossible. Crosby, in an excellent, strong, and controversial way makes the claim that freedom is consciously directed novelty. In this way, novelty is distinctive; it is not to be mistaken with either unexpected intersections of causal chains or chaos. Crosby exposes the reality of novelty throughout the book and how it applies to time, possibility, forms of materiality and embodiment, the emergence of life from nonlife, the evloution and nature of consciousness, the methods and goals of education, the character of human history and the task of historians, and also the traits of a good society. In situating novelty so firmly in the crevices of daily life, Crosby connects it to our concept of ourself, our freedom, and how we understand our relationship to the world. Through masterful readings of Isaiah Berlin, Buber, Descartes, Plato, Smart, Whitehead, and especially Henri Bergson Donald Crosby sheds new light on an elusive yet foundational concept in the history of Western thought. This book is essential to process philosophy, humanism, existentialism, philosophy of mind and consciousness, and continental thought in general.

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.

Keep the fascinating magical creatures of the wizarding world close at hand with this miniature art book featuring concept art from the Harry Potter films. The magical world of the Harry Potter film series is filled with captivating and curious creatures, from the fearsome dragons of the Triwizard Tournament to the crafty goblins of Gringotts Bank to the owls who carry the wizarding post. To bring these creatures to life onscreen, an extraordinary team of artists created a huge collection of sketches, drawings, paintings, and digital renders, drawing some creatures from established mythology and others from the depths of their imagination. One of a new line of palm-sized art books, The Art of Harry Potter: Mini Book of Creatures presents an incredible treasure trove of Harry Potter creature art in a unique miniature format. Filled with behind-the-scenes facts and insights, it’s the perfect way to keep the magic and mystery of the Harry Potter films close to your heart.

Providing a first tentative understanding of novelty and a set of implications for organizations to manage it, this book focuses on the potential offered by emergent novelty, namely novelty which is neither designed nor pursued. The author asks how organizations might increase their abilities and strategies to benefit from its early recognition. Such potential is broken down into positive terms and demonstrates how early recognition is beneficial both to organizations which aim to seize emergent innovations as well as those which aim to avoid emergent disasters. Understanding Novelty in Organizations aims to rethink the structure and strategies of organizations to gain a new balance between design and randomness in the generation of novelty. The varied perspectives presented in this work will engage scholars interested in novelty, innovation and creativity, and emergency management.

This book presents the first unified formalization for defining novelty across the span of machine learning, symbolic-reasoning, and control and planning-based systems. Dealing with novelty, things not previously seen by a system, is a critical issue for building vision-systems and general intelligent systems. The book presents examples of using this framework to define and evaluate in multiple domains including image recognition image-based open world learning, hand-writing and author analysis, CartPole Control, Image Captioning, and Monopoly. Chapters are written by well-known contributors to this new and emerging field. In addition, examples are provided from multiple areas, such as machine-learning based control problems, symbolic reasoning, and multi-player games.

Intercepted e-mails alert Homeland Security to the possibility of a terrorist attack on South Florida staged from a Bahamian island. Rhonda and Morgan Early are again recruited by the Drug Enforcement Administration to monitor suspicious activity on Bimini, located just fifty miles from Miami. Ahmed Atta needs money to implement his plan to kill sixty-five thousand Americans. He busts convicted cartel leader Victor Torres from jail for one million dollars. When Rhonda and Morgan learn of suspicious activity on Bimini, they rush to the island to thwart any potential danger. Torres inadvertently assists the terrorists by attempting to avenge his earlier capture by Morgan and Rhonda. He snatches their son and lures them to his trafficking headquarters on Plana Cay with the intent to brutally murder them. Meanwhile, Ahmed Atta's brilliant plan to kill an unfathomable number of Americans proceeds unabated.

Novelty is real. Cause-effect relationships come into existence that cannot be attributed to repetition of the relationships that came before them. This idea is relevant to everything from historical sciences, philosophy, religion, to our own subjective experience. But why, in the most general possible sense, do new things happen? It is argued here that novelty results from a kind of “symbiosis” between systems that function in similar ways, but are made from different stuff. Similarly, novelty within consciousness derives from an interactive overlap between logical thought that is representable in language, and subjective thought that is not. These ideas are developed through a consideration of a conceptual history of the new, a logical formalization of how novelty occurs, a discussion of the relevance of novelty to scientific questions surrounding Earth, life and consciousness, and an integrative reading of the respective philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.

In A Time of Novelty, Samuel Wright re-envisions the relationship between philosophy and history in premodern India. This relationship is studied through the tradition of Sanskrit logic between 1500 and 1700 CE -- the period in Indian history that witnessed the ascendency of the Mughal Empire. During this period, Sanskrit logicians would refer to themselves and their arguments as 'new,' indicating that the concept of novelty was at the center of their philosophical project. By retaining space for emotion when studying intellectual thought,this book recovers both what it means to "think" novelty and to "feel" novelty for these thinkers. Focusing on a number of little-known essays by early modern Sanskrit logicians, Wright argues that the concept of novelty is used to forge a new philosophical community in this period where novelty is both an intellectual and affective category. This perspective allows the book to raise questions that have never been asked when studying Sanskrit logic -- questions concerning critical thought, mood, imagination, and manuscript culture. Wright expands the ways in which we study philosophical thought by considering philosophy as deeply immersed in the felt experiences of one's life, at the confluence of thinking and feeling.