Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought

I bought this along with a book by Dan Dennett (on free-will) and Charles Peirce (on semiotics). Dennett's book was terrible, especially in contrast to this well written and clear book. I am a fan of Peirce's semiotics and some examples in this book "embodied" many of his concept. I was really shocked at how many parallels I was finding. Arriving at truths independently is a good sign. Lakoff and Johnson are true scientists. Peirce may be thought of as a quack although he was a genius, but L&J, while maybe not complete geniuses (rare these days anyway, see Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil on that topic for why), they are scientists of the highest order. Much better than say Pinker or even worse, Chomsky!This book is a must read for any psychology, linguistics, logic, or philosophy major.

The book was as good as stated and I was very satisfied.

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.

Glad to now own a really important work. Thanks Book Outlet.

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 of philosophy and feminist theory that preceded the conception of the embodied mind. In short, their undertaking is not "monumental," as some reviewers argue, though Lakoff and Johnson might have you believe that. Rather, their book is a lucid account of already existing theory, albeit unacknowledged, articulated through their actual groundbreaking work on metaphor.For a very brief, inexcusably incomplete survey of their predecessors, look to any third-wave feminists, Donna Haraway, Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldua, jeez, even Judith Butler, or any number of accessible philosophers, namely Gilbert Ryle, or semi-accessible pragmatists, John Dewey, C.S. Peirce, or Richard Rorty, and, if you enjoy cryptography, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri and, to a lesser extent, Michel Foucault.As for Lakoff and Johnson's text, I would just read the introduction and, if you have time, the next hundred or so pages on metaphor. The remaining sections, which fill the remaining 400 pages (!), address philosophical debates, such as the long-since defunct deep grammar of Noam Chomsky, and are better left to those who plan on writing the authors' biographies. Their writing style, which has received some criticism from other reviewers, is clear and accessible, if a bit boring. Honestly, they should have consulted with Ali-G, drawing from his interview with "Norman" Chomsky, and maybe then I wouldn't use the latter two thirds of the book as a sleep aid.At the end of the day, however, they do offer a great account of embodiment, one that goes well beyond aegis of philosophy and cognitive science. You can't blame them for posturing a bit, as they basically wrote the go-to book on metaphor, taking the concept beyond the realm of literary scholars and rhetoricians. Hubris or not, these guys are important to the history of multiple scholarly disciplines and this book marks a significant, if lesser, extension of their landmark Metaphors We Live By.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book...a bit dense in places for someone not very well versed in cognitive science jargon, but forge on; it gets better...the section on "time" is worth buying the book.

I read this book many years ago - it totally transformed my LIVING - I re-read it often. This purchase was one of several in the past as a gift to young people who demonstrate an interest in 'knowing thyself' as the foundation for living creatively.

Only after reading this book did a lot of stuff that puzzled me in my readings on philosophy now make sense. Hence Fodor's LOT and the inability of LOT to address the so called global and relevance problems I now read as being a result of Fodor's analytical approach. If one sees meaning as external and disembodied, then of course there will be a "global" problem. But if one approaches it using Lakoff and Johnson's "empirically responsible philosophy," a solution to this (and the relevancy problem) suggests itself.