Abstract

Philosophy in the Flesh is a small, important book wrapped inside a large self-important one. It begins by announcing three major “findings” of cognitive science: “The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious.concepts are largely metaphorical,” which between them bring to an end “more than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation”. To help mitigate this mortal blow to Western thought, Lakoff and Johnson helpfully propose, from empirical foundations, to build philosophy anew. The findings they detail are of extreme importance, the arguments in support of them are challenging, innovative, and largely convincing, and their willingness to explicate their implications is laudable. Yet their explicit and oft-repeated expectation that the work of cognitive scientists will deeply change the practice of philosophy, “require our culture to abandon some of its deepest philosophical assumptions,” and become “one of our most profound resources for self knowledge” is based on a questionable understanding of the foundations of philosophy, an apparently limited appreciation of the breadth and diversity of Western thought, and, more importantly, on a vision of the role of science in culture that is at best somewhat naïve, and at worst a little dangerous.