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
assumptionsthat we can know our own minds by introspection, that
most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is
disembodied and universalthat 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 bodynot 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.
關於作者：
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.
目錄：
* Introduction: Who Are We? How The Embodied Mind Challenges The
Western Philosophical Tradition * The Cognitive Unconscious * The
Embodied Mind * Primary Metaphor and Subjective Experience * The
Anatomy of Complex Metaphor * Embodied Realism: Cognitive S
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