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Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought Paperback – October 8, 1999

by George Lakoff (Author),‎ Mark Johnson (Author)

61 customer reviews

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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.

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About the Author

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.

Paperback: 640 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; New edition edition (October 8, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465056741
ISBN-13: 978-0465056743
Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.6 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 61 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #82 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Logic & Language
- #95 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
- #286 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Consciousness & Thought

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Iñaki

It is a fundamental reading for somebody who wants to understand the way we are

May 8, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very interesting, deep and complex reading which I love for the enormous depth of the reflections and thoughts. Just superb!!!!

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Clare Caldwell

Essential to understanding the inherent link between what we think we know and how we know it.

April 29, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

An easily digestible and approachable thesis on the place of language, metaphor and its role in philosophy.

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Dan

Five Stars

October 29, 2015

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A radically different philosophy that has deep roots.

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richard steinberg

Five Stars

April 3, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Excellent

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Dick Heaberlin

No just Grammar

May 28, 2011

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is an exhaustive text, not just about the structure of English, but an explanation of how to go about doing a cognitive grammar of a language and an explanation of why you would want to.

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

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José Monserrat Neto

Five Stars

August 4, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I WANT TO SEE THE TABLE CONTENTS OF AMAZON BOOKS!!!

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Gabriel Esquivel Adame

A revolution

February 6, 2009

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a refreshing view of the mind. The thesis in this book makes so much sense and the implications are such that reading it is a true thrilling experince.

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Aquagem

Noted philosopher and linguist team makes strong case for fundamental rewrite of Western philosophy.

September 27, 2013

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This heavy book's theme is essentially this: Based on what we have learned about ourselves over the several centuries from the advances in science, we can now state decisively that most of our philosophical speculations of the last 2000+ years are wrong and need to be opened up, updated, and rewritten. The pace of expansion of our modern knowledge base has left our scholarly and popular consciousness far behind, and we need a fairly radical reorientation of our world view to incorporate new findings into what Lakoff and Johnson dub "empirically responsible philosophy." Anything less than a complete rewrite will leave a detritus of old and long disproven thought to clog the path ahead. Of course, a revolutionary revision like as they suggest would be bound to create massive dislocations of its own, with results that would be inestimable in any terms. The title of the book, Philosophy in the Flesh, places Exhibit A in the trial of our legacy worldview right on the cover. Our traditional philosophy removes the mind from the body, while all current research shows it to be firmly ensconced in the brain. We are in the position of Galileo in the 17th century, who was accused of murdering the angels who had to push the planets around in their orbits to accommodate Aristotelian physical concepts. The Scientific Revolution changed everything, but much of our modern mind still clings to older views now known to be false, including a good deal of the model the Scientific Revolution posed as an alternative to even older ideas. This is a good book for anyone interested in gauging the disconnect between ancient, ancient-modern, and modern views of nature, mind, and self. Whether you agree or disagree with their claims, these authors have posed a challenge that must be met with something other than the denialism so prominent in many areas of science, history, and philosophy.

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Most recent customer reviews

My best teacher kept asking me "How did you arrive at ...

My best teacher kept asking me "How did you arrive at that?" I certainly was not there thus not able to compare what primates were like at the moment we became...Read more

Published 1 year ago by Edward Heidicker

Three Stars

Excuse me, in this 600 page book on embodiment, Heidegger and his interpreters are not mentioned once.

Published 1 year ago by e-lectra

Fascinating

Interesting challenge to western philosophy based on results from neuroscience.

Published on July 29, 2015 by David Burns

A must read.

A fascinating look at Philosophy. Even if you don't buy into the premise that thinking is fundamentally all about metaphors, it will cause you to reevaluate what you think you...Read more

Published on March 29, 2015 by Amazon Customer

Admirable thinking challenging us to reconsider our thinking presuppositionally

Lakoff and Johnson make a very simple and profound observation, on which they subsequently speculate in this hefty (624 page) volume. The observation is that thinking is embodied.Read more

Published on November 6, 2014 by Jim Harries

A blow against Western philosophy

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson acknowledge that cognitive science has reopened central philosophical questions.Read more

Published on May 22, 2014 by MWin

The font and justification make this ebook awful to read.

The content of this book may be OK, but the justification used in the Kindle version of this ebook, plus having the font locked down to one that is really hard to read make this...Read more

Published on October 16, 2013 by Justine Akehurst

Great Hubris, Great Book, Been Done Before

Despite opening the book with their modest claim, "philosophy can never be the same again," George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are correct, if they are speaking for the thirty years...Read more

Published on October 11, 2013 by Squeak

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