George Lakoff Philosophy in the Flesh

Annotation

Three major findings of cognitive science cast doubt on the past 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Lakoff and Johnson propose to rebuild philosophy from the ground up, starting from clearly known facts about the mind. . In this radical rebuilding of Western philosophy from a scientific basis, Lakoff and Johnson first describe the kind of philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously; reexamine such basic concepts as time, the mind, the self, and morality; reexamine a host of philosophical traditions from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality; and finally take on two major issues in twentieth-century philosophy: how we conceive rationality and how we conceive language. 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.