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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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.
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It ought to be possible to compare the DNA of a random individual with DNA from around the world to make a call on ethnicity, but there are problems with tests of this kind, says commentator Alva Noë.
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Family history is one thing and DNA-based ancestry is another: You just can't map beautiful, defining, important family stories onto a DNA tree, says blogger Alva Noë.
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Some intellectuals bring out the immense complexity behind simple phenomena and others, like the estimable Dr. Tyson, excel at bringing complicated ideas down to earth, says Alva Noë.
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Discoveries like the paintings deep inside dark European caves and 8,000-year-old patterns seen only from the air in Kazakhstan leave us to wonder about our ancestors' intentions, says Alva Noë.
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Lumosity has agreed to settle a deceptive advertising suit. It may be good to play the sorts of games they offer, but it doesn't mean they are a quick fix for mental strength, says blogger Alva Noë.
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Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji as its 2015 Word of the Year. Even by Oxford's own definition, it is just not a word: It's an emoticon or a pictograph, argues philosopher Alva Noë.
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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.
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The idea that physical disability isn't a property of a person, it is a property of a person together with an environmental situation, goes back to Aristotle. Philosopher Alva Noë examines the notion.
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Philosopher Alva Noë reflects on learning of two shocking events, the Paris terrorist attacks and the hospitalization of his son, through social media on the tarmac at an airport.