Alva Noë

An argument that perception is something we do, not something that happens to us: not a process in the brain, but a skillful bodily activity.

Action in Perception

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Art and Human Nature

Strange Tools

"...Philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game. For example, he ponders how observers of baseball are less interested in what happens, than in who is responsible for what happens; every action receives praise or blame. To put it another way, in baseball - as in the law - we decide what happened based on who is responsible for what happened. Noe also explains the curious activity of keeping score: a score card is not merely a record of the game, like a video recording; it is an account of the game. Baseball requires that true fans try to tell the story of the game, in real time, as it unfolds, and thus actively participate in its creation. Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noe's wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths."--Dust jacket flap.

Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark

Infinite Baseball

A noted philosopher and member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science examines flaws in current understandings about consciousness while proposing a radical solution that argues that consciousness must not be limited to the confines of the brain.

Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

Out of Our Heads

The world shows up for us, but, as Alva Noë contends in his latest exploration of the problem of consciousness, it doesn’t show up for free. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we’ve cultivated. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning—no presence to be experienced—apart from our able engagement with it.

Varieties of Presence

Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It's widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don't have a clue. In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.

Evan Thompson

A collection of works, many of them classics, on the orthodox view of visual perception.

Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception

Vision and Mind

Baseball is a strange sport: it consists of long periods in which little seems to be happening, punctuated by high-energy outbursts of rapid fire activity. Because of this, despite ever greater profits, Major League Baseball is bent on finding ways to shorten games, and to tailor baseball to today's shorter attention spans. But for the true fan, baseball is always compelling to watch -and intellectually fascinating. It's superficially slow-pace is an opportunity to participate in the distinctive thinking practice that defines the game. If baseball is boring, it's boring the way philosophy is boring: not because there isn't a lot going on, but because the challenge baseball poses is making sense of it all. In this deeply entertaining book, philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game. For example, he ponders how observers of baseball are less interested in what happens, than in who is responsible for what happens; every action receives praise or blame. To put it another way, in baseball - as in the law - we decide what happened based on who is responsible for what happened. Noe also explains the curious activity of keeping score: a score card is not merely a record of the game, like a video recording; it is an account of the game. Baseball requires that true fans try to tell the story of the game, in real time, as it unfolds, and thus actively participate in its creation. Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noe's wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths. The book ranges from the nature of umpiring and the role of instant replay, to the nature of the strike zone, from the rampant use of surgery to controversy surrounding performance enhancing drugs. Throughout, Noe's observations are surprising and provocative. Infinite Baseball is a book for the true baseball fan.

Alva Noe

Alva·No鑕

Professor of Philosophy Alva No?

Este libro cuestiona las conclusiones de los actuales estudios sobre la consciencia y rechaza la teoría de que nuestra experiencia del mundo se origine en conexiones neuronales; por el contrario, la consciencia emerge de nuestra interacción con el entorno. El autor explica que no somos nuestro cerebro, sino que éste da lugar a la consciencia al permitir un intercambio entre la persona o el animal y el mundo. Esto implica que nuestro cuerpo y nuestra mente están activos, y si cambiamos la forma de nuestra actividad, podemos cambiar nuestra propia forma, cuerpo y mente. ¿Dónde terminamos nosotros y dónde empieza el resto del mundo? No hay razón sostiene el autor para suponer que la frontera crítica se encuentre en el cerebro o en la piel.

Alva Noë

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