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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Can you choose to be a fan? Not really. Not if you're honest with yourself. As the philosopher David Papineau notes, choosing a team isn't like choosing a washing machine. With the Super Bowl looming, and his family taking sides, commentator Alva Noë tries to define what it means to be support a team. -
The Oxford English Dictionary is at work on a monumental third edition. Why? We didn't have the OED before the 1850s. Is it so unthinkable that we should do without it going forward? What are dictionaries for, anyway? Alva Noë wonders. -
Commentator and philosopher Alva Noë responds to the claim that we only ever know the world as it was, not as it is. It's all a matter of perception and interaction. -
Recent work shows there may be differences in the brains of men and women. But what does this tell us about differences between men and women? Not much, according to philosopher Alva Noë. -
Last week commentator Alva Noë drew readers' ire by suggesting that there is a conflict between science and both religion and common sense. He takes another stab at the matter here. -
What is a brain but a cloud of elementary particles? If that's the case, then isn't the world a just figment, an image or a confabulation? Commentator Alva Noë asks if our world, the world described by science, is any more real than the stories in the Bible. -
Must an artist have actually painted a piece for it to be their work? Can a forger carry another artist's work forward? Commentator Alva Noë says questions of authorship are complicated and at the heart of an ongoing dialogue across the ages. -
It feels natural to say: "huh?" According to a team of linguists in the Netherlands, this word — huh? — is universal. Commentator Alva Noë wonders if that's really possible. Do universal words exists, words common to every language here on Earth? -
Numbers tell a story. Would you believe that you're less likely to get the story right the smarter you are? Sometimes that's the case and commentator Alva Noë sees this finding as an argument in favor of an education system that trains our children to be good thinkers, not just good calculators. -
How can we think we've made sense of the world if we can't make sense of the role of values in it? Commentator and philosopher Alva Noë says this is one of the fundamental problems of our time and starts in on it by trying to tease out the intimate relationship between science and values.
