The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are
By (Author) Alva No
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
1st November 2023
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Philosophy: aesthetics
History of art
Theory of art
111.85
Physical Properties
Hardback
288
Width 140mm, Height 216mm
Description
Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenonand why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselves
In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva No 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, No 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 artour most direct and authentic way of engaging the aestheticis 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, No explores examples of entanglementin artworks and seeing, writing and speech, and choreography and dancingand 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.
Author Bio
Alva No 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.
