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Book: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
Quotes of Book: Philosophy in the Flesh: The
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  1. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.
    book-quotephilosophyhuman-natureself-knowledge

  2. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    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. ... Unless we know our cognitive unconscious fully and intimately, we can neither know ourselves nor truly understand the basis of our moral judgments, our conscious deliberations, and our philosophy.
    book-quotephilosophy

  3. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    Our categories arise from the fact that we are neural beings, from the nature of our bodily capacities, from our experience interacting in the world, and from our evolved capacity for basic-level categorization - a level at which we optimally interact with the world. Evolution has not required us to be as accurate above and below the basic level as at the basic level, and so we are not.
    book-quoteconceptualizationhuman-knowledgelimits-of-knowledge

  4. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath. The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience.
    book-quotespiritualityreligiongod

  5. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    ...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.
    book-quotetruthmeaningreason

  6. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    pg.90 of Philosophy in the Flesh: We are basing our argument on the existence of at least three stable scientific findings--the embodied mind, the cognitive unconscious, and metaphorical thought. Just as the ideas of cells and DNA in biology are stable and not likely to be found to be mistakes, so we believe that there is more than enough converging evidence to establish at least these three results. Ironically, these scientific results challenge the classical philosophical view of scientific realism, a disembodied objective scientific realism that can be characterized by the following three claims:1. There is a world independent of our understanding of it.2. We can have stable knowledge of it.3. Our very concepts and forms of reason are characterized not by our bodies and brains, but by the external world in itself. It follows that scientific truths are not merely truths as we understand them, but absolute truths. Obiviously, we accept {1} and {2} and we believe that {2} applies to the three findings of cognitive science we are discussing on the basis of converging evidence. But those findings themselves contradict {3}.
    book-quotesciencephilosophy-of-lifethinking

  7. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.
    book-quotephilosophyreasonlogic

  8. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.
    book-quotescienceimaginationtruth

  9. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.
    book-quotefreedomreasonthought

  10. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.
    book-quoteironymetaphorsmetaphysics

  11. George Lakoff _ Philosophy in the Flesh: The

    We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.
    book-quotelimitsembodimentconceptualization
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