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 (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015); Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford University Press, 2019); and Learning To Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford, 2022). His latest book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are was published by Princeton University Press in June 2023.
Alva received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy, and Chair of the Department 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. He was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s now defunct science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. Until 2025 Alva is an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University in Berlin, where is the director of the Reorganizing Ourselves research group.
Alva was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2015 – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.