Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.

• Author: Beard, David
• Position: Book Reviews

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. New York: Basic Books, 1999; PP. xiv + 624; $20.00.

George Lakoff and his collaborators have made substantial contributions to our understanding of rhetoric, argumentation, and metaphor. Metaphors We Live By remains essential reading in communication studies. By revealing the cognitive structures of metaphor and the ways that metaphors structure arguments, Lakoff and Johnson have helped us to reconceive metaphor as a trope and the relationship of argument to cognition. In More than Cool Reason, Lakoff and Turner extended the theory to encompass poetry, and while they were not, in my opinion, successful in replacing the interactionist theory of metaphor (advanced by I. A. Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric), their work marked a contribution to communication studies. Poetic metaphors, beyond being the mark of genius, also were revealed to be embedded in the deep structures of thought and of argument.

In their most recent text, Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson seem to import their theory into the heart of philosophy. Appearances are misleading, because one chapter sets the goal for the whole of the text. In chapter six, "Embodied Realism: Cognitive Science Versus A Priori Philosophy," the authors introduce the conflict between what they call first generation cognitive science, typified by the works of John Searle, and their "cognitive science of the embodied mind" (77). Despite their apparent effort to make Philosophy in the Flesh a contribution to the field of philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson's primary goal in Philosophy in the Flesh is marked in this chapter: to wrest control of cognitive studies from analytic philosophy. Their method is twofold: first, they reduce the historical and theoretical complexities of a variety of philosophical positions to cognitive metaphors and to what they call "folk theories," and, second, they thereby transform the history of philosophy into the prehistory of fi rst-generation cognitive science. The end result is several hundred pages of disciplinary polemic rather than the significant contribution to philosophy or to communication studies that we might expect from the authors of Metaphors We Live By.

Lakoff and Johnson begin with a positive program for change, a turn toward "a new, empirically responsible philosophy" (15) in cognitive studies. Their first step is to denounce the...