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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We listen to music. But is music a distinctively auditory phenomenon? Recent work in psychology suggests that we experience music as much by seeing it as by hearing it. This shouldn't surprise us, writes philosopher Alva Noë. Music isn't sound; it's action. -
While most baseball players come to the knuckleball after all else fails, one youngster has caught the media's attention by adopting the pitch early on. It's a unique story that could also bring historic change to the game. -
Faculty at San Jose State University are rebelling against pressure from their own administration to integrate MOOCs — massively open online courses — into their teaching. Across the country the issue is being debated on campuses and in state houses. Commentator Alva Noë's dips his toe into the conversation. -
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.
