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Alva Noë has devoted significant intellectual energy to developing and defending actionism about perception and consciousness. In his most recent book, Varieties of Presence, Noë takes as his subject matter “the central role understanding, knowledge, and skill play in opening up the world for [human] experience” (p. 2). While each chapter in this collection was written as a stand-alone essay (many have been previously published elsewhere), Noë has artfully orchestrated the order of the essays and substantially revised them into a coherent narrative that provides us with numerous examples of fruitful applications of his view that “perceptual presence is availability” (p. 33). According to this view, when an object is present to me—in perception or thought—it is available to me. The way it is present is determined by the set of skills (sensorimotor skills, for example) I can use to access that object. Each chapter of Noë’s book explores a different variety of presence and the associated...

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-013-9280-2

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