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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Pandora's Lab stresses that for science to work, it needs to base claims on data, studies need to be replicable, and scientists must be more attached to science than to their own ideas, says Alva Noë. -
Blogger Alva Noë reflects on Richard O. Prum's new book, Darwin's "other" idea, and the connection between the natural world and art. -
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. -
This simple question posed by ecologist Fred Smith led to profound discoveries about delicate balance and styles of regulation in healthy ecosystems, a topic covered in a new book Alva Noë considers. -
In her new book, Maia Szalavitz presents the view that addiction is a learning disorder. Commentator Alva Noe says if he understands correctly, learning may also play a role in overcoming addiction. -
Philosopher Alva Noë discusses what he calls Carlo Rovelli's "readable bestseller" Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, newly translated into English from its original Italian. -
Works of art, in all their variety, afford us the opportunity for boredom — and they do so when everything in our lives mitigates against boredom, says Alva Noë. Maybe this is one of art's gifts. -
A new book makes a strong case for the claim that animals have rich mental lives, says Alva Noë, but falters on the idea that when it comes to knowing what others think and feel, we can only guess. -
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. -
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.
