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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Alva Noë takes a look at the ways neuroscience is beginning to shed light on how we are able, as we are, to discern flavor.
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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.
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Blogger Alva Noë says he doesn't feel that, as an instructor, he has a right to ask students to come to class without technology, "even when I think, even when I know, that it would be a good thing."
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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.
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As commentator Alva Noë heads off to a youth baseball tournament with his 11-year-old son, he pauses to review a new book by Jeff Passan on the dangers of too much baseball in the lives of young kids.
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Alva Noë considers a new hypothesis suggesting dogs may have been domesticated in two different places from genetically distinct wolf populations in Europe and in East Asia.
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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.
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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.
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In videos posted to blogger Alva Noë's Facebook feed this week, a monkey and an orangutan seem to be surprised by stage magic. Noë reflects on the related conversation among his science-guru friends.
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Expertise can be acquired in different ways but, in the end, it is always the fruit of experience, the result of actual engagement with problems in a particular domain, says philosopher Alva Noë.