Old Email Archive

digest 1999-01-16 #001.txt


11:30 PM 1/15/99 -0800
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
-> interesting book announcement....
by 
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Date: 15 Jan 1999 08:30:08 -0800
From: 
Subject: interesting book announcement....
Date:    Thu, 14 Jan 1999 15:23:19 -0800
From:    "Michael Gregory, NEXA/H-NEXA" 
Subject: New Book: Philosophy in the Flesh (fwd) (PSYART)
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 16:00:46 -0500
Sender: Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts

From: Norman Holland 
Organization: English/University of Florida
From:
George Lakoff 
Wed 11:01
PLEASE FORWARD TO ANY FRIENDS OR MAILING LISTS YOU THINK WOULD BE
INTERESTED.
Just Published!
PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH
The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Basic Books
Hardcover, 624 pages, $30 list price
$21 + shipping at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com
Thought is mostly unconscious.
The mind is inherently embodied.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
These are three major findings in cognitive science that
contradict most of Western philosophy, including both Anglo-American
analytic philosophy and postmodernist philosophy.
This book asks, What would happen if we started with these
empirical discoveries about the nature of mind and constructed
philosophy anew from there?
Virtually everything changes when the embodiment of mind is
taken into account:
- -New understandings of truth and of science are required.
- -The most basic philosophical ideas-time, events, causes, the mind,
the
self, and morality-are reanalyzed in detail and shown to be radically
different than the Western tradition has supposed.
- -Great philosophical theories-from the Presocratics, Plato and
Aristotle
to Descartes and Kant to analytic philosophy-are shown to be composed
out of a small number of metaphors taken as eternal truths.
- -Even contemporary accounts of language (Chomskyan linguistics) and
rationality (the rational actor model using game theory) are shown to
have a metaphorical basis.
Most importantly, the very idea of what a human being is changes
radically.
- -There is no Cartesian person, whose essence is a mind separate from,
and independent of the body.
- -There is no Kantian, radically autonomous person, with an absolute
freedom and a transcendent universal reason that correctly dictates
what is and isn't moral.
- -There is no utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic
rationality-the maximization of utility.
- -There is no postmodernist person-no completely decentered subject
for
whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely
historically
contingent.
- -There is no person as posed by analytic philosophy for whom truth is
a correspondence between words and the world, independent of human
psychology and biology.
- -There is no computational person, whose mind is like computer
software
able to work on any suitable computer or neural hardware.
- -There is no Chomskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure
form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context,
perception,
emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of
communication and whom language is a total genetic innovation that
began
with human beings.
Contemporary cognitive science reveals that we human beings are
radically different kinds of creatures than Western philosophy has
taught us that we were.
GEORGE LAKOFF is Professor of Linguistics at the University of
California at Berkeley. He has served on the Governing Board of the
Cognitive
Science Society and has been President of the International Cognitive
Linguistics Association.
MARK JOHNSON is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy
Department at the University of Oregon.
_____________________
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