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 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 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. -
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. -
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. -
If robots pose a danger, it's because, like cars, cranes and jackhammers, they're heavy machinery operating outside the performance specifications of flesh and blood human beings, says Alva Noë.
