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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.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.