Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

George Lakoff

The University of Chicago Press

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

University of Chicago Press

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

Metaphors We Live By

Politics & Social Sciences

mark-johnson

Philosophy

University of Chicago Press, 2003

This book is about mathematical ideas, about what mathematics means-and why. Abstract ideas, for the most part, arise via conceptual metaphor-metaphorical ideas projecting from the way we function in the everyday physical world. Where Mathematics Comes From argues that conceptual metaphor plays a central role in mathematical ideas within the cognitive unconscious-from arithmetic and algebra to sets and logic to infinity in all of its forms.

Where Mathematics Come From

Science & Math

Rafael Núñez

Mathematics

Basic Books

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions-that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal-that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body-not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.

Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought

Massive 624 page book on "The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought."

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

Don't Think of an Elephant!

Politics & Government

Chelsea Green Publishing

Author George Lakoff has become a key advisor to the Democratic Party asserts that the Republican Party has enjoyed recent success because of the way it expertly frames the issues (i.e. "tax relief" and "family values." Now the author shows progressives how to beat conservatives at their own game.

Don't Think Of An Elephant

Recorded Books Productions LLC New York

Politics will be dominating the news this summer as the 2006 Senate races heat up, creating an ideal climate for George Lakoff’s new book about freedom. “Freedom” is one of the most contested words in American political discourse, the keystone to the domestic and foreign policy battles that are racking our polarized nation. For many Democrats, President Bush’s use of the word is meaningless and contradictory—applied opportunistically to justify both American military action abroad and the curtailing of civil liberties at home. But in fact the right has effected a devastatingly coherent and ideological redefinition of freedom.In a deep and alarming analysis, Lakoff argues forcefully what liberals must do to take back ground in this high-stakes war over the most central idea in American life.

Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea

Lakoff, George

Reference

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Don't Think of an Elephant : Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

Scribe Publications

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Books by George Lakoff