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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.

  • 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.
  • In a recent essay, David Graeber develops a playful panpsychism according to which play is the organizing principle of reality. Alva Noë suggests, more darkly, that it is work that organizes us all.
  • Google's announcement that users of Gmail have no "legitimate expectation" that their emails will be kept private is only the latest example of the erosion of personal privacy. This leads commentator Alva Noë to ask: if privacy is so important to people, why do we do so little to secure it?
  • Songs, like all art, can take on a life of their own once they are thrust into the public domain. Their meanings can shift substantially, something commentator Alva Noë experienced recently during a school music recital.
  • Baseball is more than a game to many people. Commentator Alva Noë thought he knew it better than most, until his children started playing Little League. That's when the community that makes up organized youth baseball welcomed him into their fold and opened his eyes to whole new levels of meaning in the game.
  • There's a lot of coughing in audiences at concerts and plays. Why? Commentator Alva Noe suggests that the answer has something to do with the importance of art.
  • What rankles so many of Lance Armstrong's detractors is the sense that somehow, he artificially enhanced himself to reach seemingly superhuman heights. Yet the story of modern humans, argues philosopher Alva Noe, is a story of our integration with artificial and mechanical enhancements.