Alva Noë's 2011 book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness concerned the liberation of the brain from the prison of what I call Cartesian internalism. He described the brain as not only a part of the body but also a part of the outside world, in a very real, rather than metaphorical, sense. The two, internal and external, cannot, according to this view, be separated. The mind is not a static container of impressions but a constant engagement with what is outside. The mind is you, your body, and the world around your body. Noë's new book, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, makes a new argument: Art is what makes us human. Not labor, as trad Marxists would have it, but the creation of art in its key forms: writing, movement, visual representation. To understand who we are, we must, according to this important philosopher, first appreciate the strangeness and even mysteriousness of art.  by Charles Mudede