Noël Carroll (born 1947) is an American philosopher and a leading figure in contemporary philosophy of art.

From 1972–1988, he worked as a journalist covering film, theater, performance, and fine art for publications such as the Chicago Reader, Artforum, In These Times, Dance Magazine, SoHo Weekly News and The Village Voice.

As noted in the book's introduction, Carroll wrote Paradoxes of the Heart in part to convince his parents that his lifelong fascination with horror fiction was not a waste of time.

Another notable book by Carroll is Mystifying Movies (1988), a critique of the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and the semiotics of Roland Barthes, which has been credited with inspiring a shift away from what Carroll describes as the "psycho-semiotic Marxism" that had dominated film studies and film theory in American universities since the 1970s.

[3] Carroll was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002[4] for his research in philosophy of dance.