What are humans? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have been at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. Philosophers' theories about these questions are based on fundamental assumptions, which are now being challenged by the established results of cognitive science.

It has been proven that: Most thoughts are unconscious. We do not have direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas move too quickly and deeply for us to simply observe them. Abstract concepts are mainly metaphorical. Many philosophical topics, such as the nature of time, ethics, causality, mind, and self, rely on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience.

The mind is embodied. Thought requires a body, not merely in the simple sense that you need a physical brain, but in the deeper sense that the structure of our thoughts derives from the nature of the body. Several of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.

Most central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are challenged by these findings. The Cartesian individual, with a mind completely separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action in accordance with the dictates of a universal logic, does not exist. The phenomenological personality, capable of knowing its mind solely through introspection, does not exist.

Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate that a philosophy that respects the science of the mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After restructuring the basic concepts of mind, time, causality, morality, and self, they reevaluate many philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks to modern analytic philosophy. "Philosophy in the Flesh" reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough reexamination of the Western philosophical tradition.

Pages: 640, Year of Publication: 1008, Dimensions: 18x18cm.