Infinite Baseball

Did you know that baseball is uniquely a 'forensic' game about allocating credit or blame? Or that performance enhancing drugs are no more disreputable than Tommy John surgery? Alva Noë, a philosopher in the bleachers, is not always convincing but is invariably interesting. And he does what a philosopher should do: When you finish this slender volume you will have a new way of seeing familiar things.

Did you know that baseball is uniquely a 'forensic' game about allocating credit or blame? Or that performance enhancing drugs are no more disreputable than Tommy John surgery? Alva Noë, a philosopher in the bleachers, is not always convincing but is invariably interesting. And he does what a philosopher should do: When you finish this slender volume you will have a new way of seeing familiar things.

Whether it's his contention that baseball isn't slow enough, his logic on the fallacy of PEDs or his thoughts on why it's OK for adults to crave a ball tossed into the stands, Alva Noë wields a philosopher's wit and wisdom to cut through modern sports' recycled rhetoric and arrive at a place we all should be: that baseball is life, it's love and it's damn near perfect.

America's national game is an invitation to philosophical reflection. Berkeley professor Alva Noë takes up the challenge with insight and wit and shows how baseball casts light on life, language, history, and being bored. This book will delight baseball fans and the philosophically minded in equal measure.

This is a delightful book. If you love baseball, or if you want to love baseball, you will love this book. Noë thinks hard about baseball and shows us just how important thinking is to this beautiful game, and how much thinking through baseball can inform our lives. His reflections call to mind not only Roger Angell, but C.L.R. James on cricket.

Noë's book is the best reflective study of the sport since A. Bartlett Giamatti's A Great and Glorious Game.

Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009) and Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015), among other books. He is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. He was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio's science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.