| View Larger Image | Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought | Paperbackby George Lakoff (Author), Mark Johnson (Author)
| List Price: | $24.95 | | Price: | $17.96 | | You Save: | $6.99 (28%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Basic Books | | Page Count: | 624 Pages | | Publication Date: | December 01, 1999 | | Sales Rank: | 51,888st |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780465056743
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Two leading thinkers offer a blueprint for a new philosophy. "Their ambition is massive, their argument important.…The authors engage in a sort of metaphorical genome project, attempting to delineate the genetic code of human thought." -The New York Times Book Review "This book will be an instant academic best-seller." -Mark Turner, University of Maryland This is philosophy as it has never been seen before. Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers a 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 analytical philosophy. |
Amazon.com Review
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems. Parts of Philosophy in the Flesh retrace the ground covered in the authors' earlier Metaphors We Live By, which revealed how we deal with abstract concepts through metaphor. (The previous sentence, for example, relies on the metaphors "Knowledge is a place" and "Knowing is seeing" to make its point.) Here they reveal the metaphorical underpinnings of basic philosophical concepts like time, causality--even morality--demonstrating how these metaphors are rooted in our embodied experiences. They repropose philosophy as an attempt to perfect such conceptual metaphors so that we can understand how our thought processes shape our experience; they even make a tentative effort toward rescuing spirituality from the heavy blows dealt by the disproving of the disembodied mind or "soul" by reimagining "transcendence" as "imaginative empathetic projection." Their source list is helpfully arranged by subject matter, making it easier to follow up on their citations. If you enjoyed the mental workout from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, Lakoff and Johnson will, to pursue the "Learning is exercise" metaphor, take you to the next level of training. --Ron Hogan |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 40 reviews)
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Philosophy for real by Shane Levine (Seattle)  4 Stars
July 10, 2009
This book critically examines the truth claims of Western philosophy through the optic of cutting edge cognitive science. Its goal is to forge a new, empirically responsible philosophy that can act as arbiter and guardian of human thought. To the dismay of many intellectuals circles, it turns out that the long tradition of Western philosophy has made many false assumptions that simply do not stand up to the facts. As such it needs to be demolished and rebuilt based on sound, experimentally verifiable evidence. That is the task of Philosophy in the Flesh.
My favorite insight:
Abstract thought is fundamentally metaphoric, meaning that we don't conceptualize abstract entities per se, but instead use concrete conceptual frameworks as metaphors for abstract concepts. For example, we conceptualize knowing as seeing, as in the phrase "I see what you're saying." In terms of philosophy, Plato's highest realization is described as *seeing* the sun (another metaphor--realizations aren't literally "high"). This realization supposedly involves transcending the body, but Plato describes it using a body based metaphor! Seeing and transcending is a contradiction. The truth is that human reasoning is based on the human body and how it works. We conceptualize time in terms of space because we are bodies that have to navigate through space everyday. We think of houses, computers and cars as having "fronts" and "backs" because our own bodies have fronts and backs. Reason, arising from the body, does not transcend the body. The implications of this discovery are profound and far reaching. This book fleshes out those implications in thrilling fashion.
A critique:
Lakoff and Johnson are liberals. I didn't appreciate their frequent glorification of liberal moral systems and cheap jabs at straw man conservative beliefs. They claim that unjust wars occur because conservative economic systems don't value innocent human lives. Actually, a basic tenet of economics is that humans act efficiently when they *internalize* the costs of their actions. If someone kills innocents without internalizing the costs (which would mean their own death), then they are not acting in an economically desirable fashion. Clearly the authors don't understand economics or they are irrationally hostile towards it. Wars occur because humans are selfish, violent apes that act for their own benefit and have trouble being compassionate towards people who are on the other side of an ocean. Liberal economics won't solve that problem. Also, L and J support liberal moral systems that view the natural environment as having "inherent" worth. The problem is that their whole theory of embodied cognition completely precludes the possibility of something having objective, transcendent value.
A few thoughts:
I question to what extent human thought is constrained by metaphor. Surely in our day to day lives we use loose metaphors to conceptualize abstractions, but what about disciplined scientific thinking? L and J contend that even math is metaphoric, but how can a subjective system of metaphors (math) allow us to manipulate our environment and make predictions (such as solar eclipses--the beginning of Western philosophy ironically) with such stunning precision? Rather I suspect that humans have grasped certain objective features of the universe that transcend metaphor. That's how we flew to the moon.
Final comment:
It would have been nice if L and J mentioned Chinese philosophy, which contains profound nuggets of embodied realism. The Taoist Zhuangzi knew that our perception of beauty is subjective. He gives the example of a beautiful woman: if a bear or a deer saw the woman, would they be entranced by her beauty? No, they would run or attack! Unlike Plato and his 2.5 thousand year legacy, Zhuangzi knew that humans see the world through a very biased lens: their brains.
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Excellent alternate viewpoint on various philosophy, religion issues by L. Dusseault (Palo Alto, CA USA) 4 Stars
April 09, 2009
It's a long book but kept me interested through the whole read. The authors break down various language, philsophy and religious approaches into the component metaphors. The authors definitely have their own preferred metaphors to promote (the nurturing parent metaphor for society, the embodied spiritualism or immanent god metaphor for spiritualism) but this doesn't detract much from the book overall and in some sense it's good to know their preferences.
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A revolution by Gabriel Esquivel Adame  5 Stars
February 06, 2009
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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Linguistic and Philosophy together. by George H. Steele (Wisconsin, USA) 5 Stars
January 27, 2008
This is a scholarly work with all the bases covered. What Western Philosophy is from Descartes to Kant to modern philosophy and how this changes things.
The linguistics and philosophy are both presented in very accessible language so that no background in either is a prerequisite. It is a very readable work for the non-scholar.
Good read.
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Omission of Nietzsche by Dr. William Plank  2 Stars
June 26, 2007
It is not possible to deal properly with such a subject by using Kant, leaving out Nietzsche and the selfish gene of Dawkins. The general philosophers they use are in the shadow of a platonist metaphysic (the Socratic Judaeo-Christian metaphysic) which thus forces them to deal with pseudo-problems. Sorry to be so grumpy. It is easy to stand back and take pot-shots at another person's work.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
by Mark Johnson (Author)
"There are books--few and far between--which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."--Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle
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| Metaphors We Live By
by George Lakoff (Author), Mark Johnson (Author)
"An engaging, accessible discussion, replete with examples, of the varieties of metaphor and how they work."--Mary Sirridge, Teaching Philosophy
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| Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
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"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."--David E. Leary,...
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| Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being
by George Lakoff (Author), Rafael Nuñez (Author)
Renowned linguist George Lakoff pairs with psychologist Rafael Nuñez in the first book to provide a serious study of the cognitive science of mathematical ideas. This book is about mathematical ideas, about what mathematics means-and why. Abstract ideas, for the most part, arise via conceptual metaphor-metaphorical ideas projecting from the way we function in the everyday physical world. Where Mathematics Comes From argues that conceptual metaphor plays a central role in mathematical...
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| More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
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"The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it's never gone away. We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool.' What we're saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." -- Hugh Kenner, Johns Hopkins University "In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get...
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