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.
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As adults, we live life project to project, looking ahead to the almost certain completion of each. Research shows that we can be more in the present by shaking things up, says philosopher Alva Noë. -
As one of the world's leading developmental psychologists, Alison Gopnik is in a position to state with authority that no one knows what's best when it comes to raising kids, says blogger Alva Noë. -
What is the connection trees have to each other? Alva Noë discusses a new book about trees, what they know, what they need and how they act. -
Alva Noë takes a look at the ways neuroscience is beginning to shed light on how we are able, as we are, to discern flavor. -
Humans have been wearing clothes for millennia. Nudity, for humans, is not nakedness but the absence of clothes. Philosopher Alva Noë reflects on this in light of current and not-so-current debates. -
Alva Noë explores a new book that considers the complicated relationship between humans and animals by looking at attitudes toward road kill, taxidermy, dead pets and art by animals. -
Turner's whaling paintings, recently on display at the Met, do little to convey the detail of the whale's powerful movement or the seas — but what they do create is atmosphere, says Alva Noë. -
Blogger Alva Noë says he doesn't feel that, as an instructor, he has a right to ask students to come to class without technology, "even when I think, even when I know, that it would be a good thing." -
Beep baseball is a game that requires trust, quiet and cooperation between the sighted and the blind. It gives us an opportunity to think about human ability and disability anew, says Alva Noë.
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Alva Noë considers the idea that we have entered an era in which our technologies are so complex that they exceed what any of us can really grasp, as suggested in a new book by Samuel Arbesman.
