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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38236 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

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

From Library Journal
Written by distinguished Berkeley linguist Lakoff and his coauthor on Metaphors We Live By (1983), this book explores three propositions claimed as "major findings" of cognitive science: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical." Cognitive science, with its basic materialist bent, applies computer-based concepts, a little neurophysiology, and linguistic theory to human mental life. It will, the authors say, drastically change philosophy. They seem to think that we are really run by our deep wiring and the cultural concepts that become embodied metaphors. While seeking clarity by drawing out the implications of their basic notions, they add new puzzles. What does it mean to say "reason is not disembodied"? Read this book to see how (some?) cognitive scientists think. But read it with Charles P. Siewert's recent The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton Univ., 1998) for the traditional notions of consciousness. Readers will find there's still room for their own judgments.?Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His other books include Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Moral Politics, and Metaphors We Live By, which he co-authored with Mark Johnson.

Mark Johnson is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon. Besides Metaphors We Live By, he is the author of The Body in the Mind and Moral Imagination and editor of the anthology Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor.

Customer Reviews

Linguistic and Philosophy together.
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.

Omission of Nietzsche
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.

What western philosophy should be.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have now demonstrated in this book that philosophy is almost exclusively based in human experience and not in abstraction. Unfortunately, they had to bring their own extreme personal political and religious views into what was a good linguistic text. This book is like many others in that you must discern the good (i.e., the epistemology) and disregard the bad (i.e., their personal options of politics, religion, and morality).