The Entanglement, Alva Noe
The Entanglement, Alva Noe
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The Entanglement
How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

Author: Alva Noe

Narrator: Christopher Douyard

Unabridged: 7 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/27/2023


Synopsis

In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.

Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeated with the aesthetic. Indeed, human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art is the truest way of understanding ourselves. All this suggests that human nature is not a natural phenomenon. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology. In making these provocative claims, Noë explores examples of entanglement and examines a range of scientific efforts to explain the human.

Challenging the notions that art is a mere cultural curiosity and that philosophy has been outmoded by science, The Entanglement offers a new way of thinking about human nature, the limits of natural science in understanding the human, and the essential role of art and philosophy in trying to know ourselves.

About Alva Noe

Alva Noe is a writer and philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Out of Our Heads and Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, among other books. He is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. He was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio's science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Pranjal

Alva Noë makes the reader rethink their relationship to the self in this deeply introspective book on the effects of art and philosophy on the human consciousness. While the prose can become a word soup sometimes, it is a fairly coherent and readable book. Noë, undoubtedly makes some compelling poin......more

Goodreads review by Bernie

This book examines how art and philosophy are integral to being human, as well as how those activities are linked to each other. Drawing on the fields of dance, graphic arts, and poetics, the book presents a different way of thinking about aesthetics and of understanding what constitute aesthetic en......more