Text seminar on
Strange Tools
– Art and Human Nature 4 cr
Teacher in charge: University lecturer Taneli Tuovinen
with Prof. (emerita) Riitta Hari and Prof. Helena Sederholm
4. period 1.3.-29.3. 2017 , room 5010
Wednesdays 9.30 - 12
We will read and discuss the book
Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015)
by philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë.
ISBN: 978-0-8090-8917-8
• Learning outcomes:
• The student will be able to deal with various
levels of contemporary discourse on the technique
and technology based artistic reality and its
outcomes, argue for and against the theoretical
approaches and standings.
• The course will deal with a variety of problems in
relationship of art and cognition (in neuroscience,
art history, cultural theory, artistic research,
philosophy) and their place in the everyday life,
popular culture and in public debate.
The program of the seminar
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1.3. Introduction
8.3. Part I (pages 3 – 77)
15.3. Part II (pages 93 – 134)
22.3. Part III (pages 145 – 182)
29.3. Part IV (pages 193 – 206)
Alva Noë (1964-)
• Writer and philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He is the
author of
• Action in Perception (MIT 2004)
• Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons
from the Biology of Consciousness (FSG 2009),
• Varieties of Presence (Harvard 2012), and, most recently,
• Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (FSG, 2015).
• He is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media
and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Noë is a weekly
contributor to National Public Radio’s science and culture blog 13.7
Cosmos and Culture.
• http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/
• To understand why Noë calls art-works
“strange tools” we should know a little bit
about the debates and arenas of his
argumentations.
• In his early publications Noë has called his
approach as
enactivist or sensori-motor or senso-motor
“consciousness is not something that just
happens to us, it is something we do”
Enactivism
• The introduction of the term enaction in this
context is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch,who proposed the
name to
"emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is
not the representation of a pre-given world by a
pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a
world and a mind on the basis of a history of the
variety of actions that a being in the world
performs”
Francisco J Varela; Evan Thompson; Eleanor Rosch (1992). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and
human experience. MIT Press. p. 9.
Enactment of a world
= techniques/technologies of access
• This is how Alva debates in scientific
discourse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aPeWc7U
m1A
• This is how Alva talks to dancers on his
approach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlKvpPDUy
Wc&t=31s
Biology: a common genus of art and
philosophical practice?
• Difference between inorganic and organic: organism
has capacity to self/re-organisation
• “art provides us an opportunity to catch ourselves in
the act of achieving our conscious lives (enacting a
world, organizing ourselves with everything else,
performing our skills and technoloques of access)”
• What is our nature?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcidL9uXw6A&t=
1489s (13:00 – 22:21)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzXMhcEp1E&t=277s (6:40 – 10:20)
• We meet 4 times in March on Wednesdays
(9.30 – 12)
• Each session will begin with short introduction
of the themes of the text we have read.
• Who wants to give a short intro next week?