Learning to Look

Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (2004); Out of Our Heads (2009); Varieties of Presence (2012); and Strange Tools (2015). His latest book is Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (2019). Alva received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is 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 also collaborated creatively with dance artists Deborah Hay, Nicole Peisl, Jess Curtis, Claire Cunningham, Katye Coe, and Charlie Morrissey. Alva is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies.

Preface

Encounters
1 Soup is an anagram of opus
2 I am sitting in a room
3 40 speakers in a room
4 Two left hands
5 Rock art
6 The power of performance
7 Cheap thrills at the Whitney
8 Whaling with Turner
9 Take my breath away
10 Speak, draw, dance
11 Beach beasts on the move
11 Making the work work
13 Irrational man
14 RoboCop's philosophers
15 Pointing the way to liberation, in Star Trek: Voyager
16 An Awkward Synthesis

Pictures
17 The anatomy lesson
18 The importance of being dressed
19 The art of the brain
20 Faces and masks
21 The philosophical eye
22 The camera and the dance
23 Why are 3-D movies so bad?
24 The myth of 3-D immersion
25 Storying telling and the