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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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.
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What makes some middle-aged men and women act like children at the baseball park? Commentator Alva Noë wonders about that distinct attitude of love and longing that we call "being a fan."
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Do our morals hold fast when presented with a dilemma in a foreign language? A new study suggests they may not and commentator Alva Noë takes issue.
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Striking similarities between Pharrell's "24 Hours of Happy" and an indie film also featuring dance have people talking. Alva Noë says the thing that connects the two is how we all move to music.
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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.
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Can natural science find a place for us in its vision of the cosmos? Thomas Nagel, in a new book, demands we take this question seriously. He is right to do so.