Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature
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.
Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. A graduate of Columbia University, he holds a BPhil from the University of Oxford and a PhD from Harvard University. Noë is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim fellowship and is a weekly contributor to NPR’s science blog, 13.7: Cosmos & Culture.