Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

This is a scholarly work with all the bases covered. What Western Philosophy is from Descartes to Kant to modern philosophy and how this changes things.


The linguistics and philosophy are both presented in very accessible language so that no background in either is a prerequisite. It is a very readable work for the non-scholar.


Good read.

It is not possible to deal properly with such a subject by using Kant, leaving out Nietzsche and the selfish gene of Dawkins. The general philosophers they use are in the shadow of a platonist metaphysic (the Socratic Judaeo-Christian metaphysic) which thus forces them to deal with pseudo-problems. Sorry to be so grumpy. It is easy to stand back and take pot-shots at another person's work.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have now demonstrated in this book that philosophy is almost exclusively based in human experience and not in abstraction. Unfortunately, they had to bring their own extreme personal political and religious views into what was a good linguistic text. This book is like many others in that you must discern the good (i.e., the epistemology) and disregard the bad (i.e., their personal options of politics, religion, and morality).

I read the editors reviews above and the top customer reviews for this text. I don't feel I need to cover the same ground and I'm not going to. However, I have some personal thoughts that may be useful to add.

In my opinion, Philosophy in the Flesh is a monumental undertaking because it is an attempt to topple an existing paradigm marked by many unexamined assumptions about the nature of the mind, consciousness and the mind-body relationship. This is a very tall order and while the book has some shortcomings, it successfully makes a dent in this direction.

I agree with one reviewer's comments about not including and integrating work from researchers on the relationship between consciousness, the body and emotions such as Damasio. To get this background on your own, I would consider reading "The Feeling of What Happens" and other research in the field. I also agree with this same reviewer's comment about neglecting an evolutionary perspective and to get this I would start by reading David Buss. Understanding our cognitive biases is important and many of these do come from evolutionary psychology. For dramatic examples of these, you might try reading THE EVOLUTION OF DESIRE on sexual mating strategies or JEALOUSY by David Buss. There are also other many good books in this general genre and David Buss has written more than a few of them.

With respect to PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH itself, I found the first 136 pages most useful. This justifies the cost of the book because it lays out the author's basic theories, the disconnects between what we know about the mind and what is assumed to be true because of an enduring, but outdated concept of the mind-body relationship. In other words, the first 136 pages are like a nitty-gritty short book on the "must know" concepts.

The remainder of the book goes more deeply into specific examples of how the mind is embodied, the role of unconscious condition as the "hidden hand" that influences our actions, etc. It basically amounts to a defense of the first 136 pages, which in itself is convincing and compelling.

This book has implications for anyone who is interested in the mind-body relation and the body's role in cognition. Not everyone will want to read all of it, but I found that picking it up periodically and diving deeper into specific areas useful. It's not a bedtime story, so plowing through all 600 pages over a week or two might be a bit too much for someone who isn't a specialist in this area.

Lakoff has also written some interesting things on metaphor in dreams. If you have an interest in dreams, this book might be thought provoking and if so, you might also be interested in some of Lakoff's articles on interpreting dreams. If you want a nice introduction to dream interpretation that has a good article by Lakoff, consider DREAMS edited by Kelly Bulkeley. (Kelly also has a lot of other excellent books on dreaming and is quite a scholar in that area.)

I liked this book and I think it made a good dent in bringing down an outdated paradigm. I think anyone who is a cognitive therapist should read this and consider the implications. This would also be a good book for people who are more somatically-oriented therapists or who have a strong interest in mind-body medicine. I think Feldenkrais practioners and Rosen Bodyworks people would also benefit greatly from understanding this material.

Lastly, if you like this book, you might also like AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (Feldenkrais), the EMBODIED MIND (Varela), THE ANATOMY OF CHANGE and The Body (Yuasa Yasuo). Some of these books are less mainstream than others, but they are ALL thought provoking in different ways.

This is a big, thick, and dull book. Much of what is in it seems trivial. And I feel that were the material in this book to be lost somehow, it could be re-invented so easily that one has to doubt its overall value.

The authors start by saying that abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. And that may well be true, but I feel the authors do not make much of a case for all this having much significance. There is also a discussion of how people categorize concepts; it's not particularly profound.

We see Lakoff and Johnson talk about scientific truth. But I'm not impressed. In fact, there are some mathematical "truths" whether we are aware of them or not. And there are some aspects of reality that we may or may not recognize. And that is about it. My guess is that most folks could, if they applied themselves, write a better essay on truth than the authors did.

There's a section on time. Saint Augustine and Zeno get mentioned here, even though I feel that they were hardly great thinkers. We do not even see Augustine's question about whether time is discrete or continuous (actually a very good question) let alone his idiotic answer to it. And the authors have plenty to say about events and causes, once again offering little of value.

Next we see a discussion of the mind. It is explained that we make analogies between unappetizing food and distasteful ideas, but even this is in fact garbled. In fact, we have a greater tendency to make analogies between unappetizing items and lies.

The authors talk about artificial intelligence and the Turing test. This section is not all that special, but I actually liked it, and I feel that it is worth reading.

There is plenty about the use of language. But most of it is not very illuminating. I could talk about language as well and, say, examine the difference between "getting ahead of oneself" and "being beside oneself." But I doubt there would be much value in that!

The authors talk about some famous philosophers of the past. In doing so they mention that it makes no sense to speak of a time before the Big Bang, since time did not exist then. But that's merely semantic, and it is (in my opinion) a particularly silly thing to say in a book on philosophy! By simply asking if it's a little provincial to say that Reality extends in time to only a few times the age of our planet, I've already said something sensible (and maybe even profound!) about Reality outside of the Big Bang.

Lakoff and Johnson include a weak chapter on morality. But to their credit, they do at least show some of the problems with various types of moral systems. Of course, we do not need the authors to tell us that. For example, we can all see that during World War Two, many Jewish officials (highly educated to be moral leaders) in communities that were being annihilated wound up with (quite deservedly) no moral authority whatsoever with those who remained in these communities.

We read about theories of "rational action." Once again, I found little of value here. I do think it makes sense for people to be responsible for their actions and to benefit from their accomplishments, but I can't see why it would be profound to say so.

At the end of the book, there is a mention of evolutionary theories. That could have led to an interesting discussion of what direction we're all headed in, what we ought to do to get there, how to avoid upcoming problems, and how to adapt to what could be Reality in the future. All this could have been discussed in more detail, but the authors did not do that.

There's some good material in the book, so I am awarding it three stars, but I feel it is barely worth reading.