Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. He is writer and a philosopher who works on the nature of mind and human experience.
Noë received his PhD from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has recently begun a performative-lecture collaboration with Deborah Hay. Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.
He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); and most recently, Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012). He is now at work on a book about art and human nature.
-
Many addicts opt for self-medication over encounter — they turn inward and shut out the world, says commentator Alva Noë, as he ponders a new book on addiction by Johann Hari. -
David J. Linden's new book on touch brings into focus all the things we still don't understand about the neural basis of this sense, says commentator Alva Noë. -
Philosopher Alva Noë explores ideas in a new book that suggests consciousness and self is best looked at by combining insight from Western science, Indian philosophy and contemplative practices.
-
The end of the World Series allows us to revisit baseball's experiment with instant replay. Commentator Alva Noë argues it has been a success — because it makes the game not more fair but more fun. -
The basic phenomenon of speaking, expressing meaning in words — and also that of copying or recording what we hear — is laid bare before our eyes by artist Alvin Lucier, says commentator Alva Noë. -
A remarkable retrospective of the German-Danish painter's career is nearing the end of its run at Frankfurt's Städel Museum. Commentator Alva Noë has just seen it and shares his reactions. -
A new book by Scott Weems on humor and human nature raises fascinating questions about why we laugh. Commentator Alva Noë cracks up easily and asks for help collecting some more jokes. -
Must an artist have actually painted a piece for it to be their work? Can a forger carry another artist's work forward? Commentator Alva Noë says questions of authorship are complicated and at the heart of an ongoing dialogue across the ages. -
Anri Sala's installation at the Venice Biennale explores music, the body, technology, gender and the making of art. Alva Noë says the three-part work is a delightful puzzle, with all the pieces coming together in the end to envelop the audience in a story that is bigger than the sum of its parts. -
Robert Irwin's current showing at the Whitney Museum of American Art is astonishing. But why? Alva Noë gives it a good look over and finds that the work is nothing and everything at once.
