Alva Noë: Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

Neuroaesthetics | Symposium


Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie,
22.-24. November 2012
In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen
Hertie-Stiftung.


Despite enormous and widespread enthusiasm for the project of
using the
methods of neuroscience to investigate art and its importance for
us, results have been few and far between. In this talk –
focusing on a range of cases, but with special attention to the
problem of pictorial representation – I propose that there may be
principled reasons why neuroscience will fail to make a
productive contribution to the study of art.


Dr. Alva Noë 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
received his Ph.D. in 1995 from Harvard University. He also holds
degrees from Columbia and Oxford Universities.
Noë has been a fellow of the Wissensschaftskolleg zu Berlin and
he is a permanent fellow of the Humboldt University Research
Project on Embodiment and the Picture-Act. Noë is “philosopher in
residence” with the Forsythe Company andhe is a 2012 Guggenheim
Fellow. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press,
2004), Out of Our Head: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other
Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (FSG / Hill and Wang,
2009), and Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press,
2012).