Embodied mind, meaning, and reason: how our bodies give rise to understanding

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-245) and index.

Mark Johnson is one of the great thinker of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades to argue for the central importance of our bodies in everything we experience, mean, think, say, value, and do. This embodied conception of mind shows how meaning and thought are profoundly shaped and constituted by the nature of our bodily perception, action, and feeling. In short, Johnson convincingly argues that it is impossible to understand any of the issues that are so dear to philosophy without a deep and detailed understanding of how our embodiment gives rise to experience, meaning, and thought. Johnson begins with ideas that were anticipated, in part, in the writings of American pragmatist John Dewey, and supplies crucial details from important scientific and philosophical developments that take us beyond what Dewey could provide in his time. By constructing a positive account of human meaning-making that draws on the cognitive science of the embodied mind, Johnson's account runs directly counter to some of the fundamental assumptions in analytic philosophy and early cognitive science of the last seventy-five years. Concluding with a rich exploration of the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason is indispensable to all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language. -- from back cover.