The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason

"The Body in the Mind" explores the ways that meaning, understanding, and rationality arise from and are conditioned by the patterns of our bodily experience. In emphasizing the role of the body, Mark Johnson offers a corrective to dominant theories of meaning in Western philosophy, which have maintained a strictly abstract, propositional account of meaning detached from persons or experience. Expanding on his work with George Llakoff in the pathbreaking book "Metaphors We Live By," Johnson presents here an extended philosophical account, exposing the inadequacies of the objectivist philosophical tradition in its rigid separation of mind from body, cognition from emotion, and reason from imagination. He develops a constructive theory of the ways in which imagination links cognitive and bodily structures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)