Strange Tools
Art and Human Nature
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves
In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
No (Out of Our Heads), a philosopher specializing in perception and consciousness, explores aesthetics from an unlikely starting point: activities like breastfeeding, reading a sign on a wall, driving a car, opening a door, or conversing with a friend. We "lose ourselves in the flow" of these "organized activities," as he calls them an expression of our biological and existential condition. But the myriad activities that organize and constantly reorganize our lives are difficult to untangle, and as No gets caught up in them, the reader gets lost. Art, like philosophy, the author argues, "is a practice for bringing our organization into view." No explores this conceit through a range of topics as they relate to art, such as the importance of boredom, the role of criticism, and the impossibility of neuroscience explaining art, with analogies from baseball to barkeeping, and help from the work of philosophers such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, and John Dewey. In relating complex problems in perception and consciousness, which have long filled pages in philosophy journals, No mostly forgoes jargon and citations in favor of mercifully plainer prose. Still, the book meanders through a lot of conceptual ground despite tilting toward the visual arts Western and modern at that and away from music, film, poetry, and fiction.
