Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought: Amazon.co.uk: George Lakoff, Mark Johnson: Books

Amazon.co.uk 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 re-propose 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 re-imagining "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

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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 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.

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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

Well worth reading, a refreshing vision 26 Mar 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

So begins Philosophy In The Flesh. The authors then analyze Western philosophical traditions from the perspective of these finding in cognitive science. The book is a journey through Western philosophy. While reading this, one feels that one is taking a favorite journey anew from a new perspective.

This layman found the book to be a coherent and fascinating explanation of the nature of reason. The book explains how basic-level concepts; conceptual frames, spatial relations and metaphor are used to construct complex concepts. The book also gives a plausible explanation for why much of thought is universal and yet much is relative between cultures, languages and individuals.

The authors then criticize rational actor models such as those that form the basis of the Western economic, legal, and international relations systems. Their premise is that the western belief that there can be an autonomous rational self is mistaken and this belief leads to mistakes that adversely affect the environment, cultures and individuals when the rational actor models are applied to real systems.

The authors close with a vision of what an embodied philosophy is. They believe that human beings have an embodied metaphoric reason, a limited freedom to adjust conceptual tools, and a morality that based on human embodied experience. The authors believe that it is human nature to change and evolve.

The authors fall onto thin ice in the final section of the book. Their view of evolution as a nurturing system and not a competitive one is not one likely to be shared by most biologists. Clearly nurturing parents are an advantage for many animals, but to say that nature as a whole is a nurturing system is wildly romantic. Additionally the authors wish to define a new moral vision that could be shared by all of humanity. Sadly, but not surprisingly, they do not present a coherent system of morality that could replace the rational actor models they criticize.

Despite these weaknesses, this book is well worth reading as it supplies a refreshing vision that defines what it is to be a thinking human being.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Excellent but neglected Wittgenstein 15 Feb 1999

Format:Hardcover

I've read, or read in, all the authors previous works with enthusiasm. This fulfills what was promised in those earlier works. My only disappointment so far (I've skipped around)was the short shrift they gave to the later Wittgenstein. What Lakoff and Johnson have in breadth, I think Wittgenstein will add much depth. As a matter of fact, I plan to use this book to organize ideas about Wittgenstein's later work. I understand why the authors may not have wished to say much about Wittgenstein, as everybody sees a different Wittgenstein: Mind and World by McDowell, Truth and Objectivity by Crispin Wright, etc. I still feel an authentic Wittgenstein can be found, and the Lakoff and Johnson will be a great help in finding him. If anyone is interested in exchanging insights, I am thirsty for conversation. (roparrl@aol.com)

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful

Equally painful and pleasurable 25 July 1999

Some of the comments have been unkind on this book, and this is in part correct. The sheer breadth of what they attempt to do - a reconceptualising of philosophy through the body - means that, even in 500+ pages, there is little doubt they can do the subject justice. They have a damn good go, though.

I found the book alternately easy-going and hard, interesting and repellant. People will bring their own specialisations with them when they read the book and so will become enraged at different points within the book. My personal interest - in physiological vision - was mentioned only really in passing but there was enough there to use on other matters for the book to be considered generally useful. I do resent having to read all through it and having to endure repetition, though. The phrase about '2nd-generation cognitive science', as if it were a panacea, contributes towards the narrow-minded scientism that they were presumably attempting to rid 20th-Century philosophy of in the first place -- especially in their dealings of analytic philosophy.

And their treatment of 'poststructuralist' philosophy is best forgotten, even though Iragary, Grosz and Deleuze could have given them a big helping hand...