The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason

An exploration of the central role the human imagination plays in all meaning, understanding, and reasoning.

“There are books . . . which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity.” —San Francisco Chronicle

The Body in Mind explores the ways that meaning, understanding, and rationality arise from and are conditioned by the patterns of our bodily experience. In emphasizing the body, Mark Johnson points out the inadequacies of objectivist philosophy in its rigid separation of mind from body, cognition from emotion, and reason from imagination. He develops a theory of how imagination links cognitive and bodily structures, showing that such basic concepts as balance, scale, force, and cycles emerge from our physical experiences and can be metaphorically extended to express abstract meaning and rational connections.

“A provocative, current, and suggestive piece of work. Scholars and teachers in . . . linguistics, psychology, and philosophy will find in it much that is of value.” —Child Development Abstracts

“An outstanding contribution to contemporary cognitive science.” —Language

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