Alva Noë

Philosophical work

Noë joined the University of California, Berkeley Department of Philosophy as an associate professor in 2003, where he was a member of the UC Berkeley Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, serving as a core faculty member for the Program in Cognitive Science and the Center for New Media. During 2011–12, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Before coming to University of California, Berkeley, Noë was an assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a Post-doctoral Research Associate of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, a visiting scholar at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at University of California, Irvine and at the Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS/EN/EHESS) in Paris, a McDonnell-Pew Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. Noë has been a recipient of a UC President's Fellowship in the Humanities and an ACLS/Ryskamp Fellowship, and in 2007–08 was a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Noë is the author of the books Strange Tools (2015),Varieties of Presence (2012), Out of Our Heads (2009) and Action In Perception (MIT Press, 2004). He is the co-editor of Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (MIT Press, 2002) and the author of Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? (Imprint Academic, 2002). In Action In Perception, Noë puts forth the notion of the sensorimotor profile. Externalism about the mind and mental content is a pervasive theme in his work.

Personal life

Noë is the son of the architect, sculptor and restaurateur Hans Noë, the former proprietor of the Fanelli Cafe. His mother Judith Baldwin is a ceramicist. His brother Sasha is a sculptor and has taken over running the Fanelli Cafe.