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The Entanglement

How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

Alva Noë

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Paperback

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English
Princeton University Press
01 June 2025
Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon

and why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselves.

In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noe 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, Noe 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

our most direct and authentic way of engaging the aesthetic

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, Noe explores examples of entanglement

in artworks and seeing, writing and speech, and choreography and dancing

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.
By:  
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 133mm, 
ISBN:   9780691249575
ISBN 10:   0691249571
Pages:   288
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Alva Noe is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a member of the Center for New Media, the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the Program in Critical Theory. His many books include Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World.

Reviews for The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

""Winner of the Outstanding Monograph Prize, American Society for Aesthetics"" ""What Noë shows is how that essential act of ‘making’ art is more than just an act of pleasure. What it really encompasses is a radical act of inquiry into our entanglement.""---Adam Frank, Big Think ""Art is at the heart of philosophy and the fusion of the two with a range of subjects can help us better understand what makes us human. . . . Alva Noë has introduced his thesis that is bound to generate enough debate on the antidote supplied by art and philosophy that 'makes us what we are,' a state where the people, surrounded by music, art, sculpture, poetry become creative enough to break out of the codified social organisation into a more liberated and an inspirationally fulfilling life infused with the aesthetic.""---Shelley Walia, The Hindu ""For a half-decade, I’ve been puzzling through art’s functionless function with Alva Noë. . . . [The Entanglement] digs into the difference between the pictures and objects humans use every day, to shop on Amazon.com or to call on their gods, and the pictures and objects we use as works of art.""---Blake Gopnik, New York Times ""Alva Noë’s fascinating and expansive new book gives an account of what art does, what it and philosophy of philosophy have in common, and how these activities should be situated in our best account of the world.""---Owen Andrew Wynn, Times Literary Supplement ""[An] interesting interdisciplinary book exploring the inseparability of life, art and philosophy in the context of an entangled reality… is an original and liberating phenomenological perspective in relation to existential self-making and world-making.""---David Lorimer, The Paradigm Explorer


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