Issue: Current challenges

What does it mean to be human? How is knowledge possible? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the centre of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions — that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal and that reason is disembodied and universal — that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science.

Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. This book re-examines the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality and the self; it rethinks a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosophy. Lakoff and Johnson reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors.

Philosophy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosophy as it has never been seen before.