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What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth?
Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the
center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them,
philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions—that we can know
our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the
world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal—that are
now called into question by well-established results of cognitive
science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious.
We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and
language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to
observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly
metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the
nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies
heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is
literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually
impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we
have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which
represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and
in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought
requires a body—not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain
to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our
thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our
unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the
central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into
question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly
separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of
moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not
exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind
entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian
person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the
computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all
do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy
responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed
understandings of what a person is. After first describing the
philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science
seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time,
causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of
philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian
morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical
structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics
of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major
issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and
how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a
radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a
thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is
philosopy as it has never been seen before.
George Lakoff is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and the coauthor, with Mark Johnson, of Metaphors We Live By. He was one of the founders of the generative semantics movements in linguistics in the 1960s, a founder of the field of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, and one of the developers of the neural theory of language in the 1980s and '90s. His other books include More Than Cool Reason (with Mark Turner), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and Moral Politics. Mark Johnson is professor and head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon and is on the executive committee of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences there. In addition to his books with George Lakoff, he is the editor of an anthology, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor.
Description
What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth?
Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the
center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them,
philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions—that we can know
our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the
world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal—that are
now called into question by well-established results of cognitive
science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious.
We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and
language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to
observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly
metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the
nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies
heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is
literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually
impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we
have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which
represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and
in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought
requires a body—not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain
to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our
thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our
unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the
central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into
question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly
separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of
moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not
exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind
entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian
person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the
computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all
do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy
responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed
understandings of what a person is. After first describing the
philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science
seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time,
causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of
philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian
morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical
structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics
of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major
issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and
how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a
radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a
thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is
philosopy as it has never been seen before.
George Lakoff is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and the coauthor, with Mark Johnson, of Metaphors We Live By. He was one of the founders of the generative semantics movements in linguistics in the 1960s, a founder of the field of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, and one of the developers of the neural theory of language in the 1980s and '90s. His other books include More Than Cool Reason (with Mark Turner), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and Moral Politics. Mark Johnson is professor and head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon and is on the executive committee of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences there. In addition to his books with George Lakoff, he is the editor of an anthology, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor.
