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Philosophy in the Flesh
Lakoff and Johnson's 1999 magnum opus arguing that most of Western philosophy is built on conceptual metaphors its practitioners have mistaken for literal truths — and that embodied cognition dissolves the disembodied rationalism the tradition depends on.
Philosophy in the Flesh is the 1999 book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that applied conceptual metaphor theory and embodied cognition to the Western philosophical tradition. The book's central argument is that most major philosophical positions — from Plato through Descartes to twentieth-century analytic philosophy — are built on conceptual metaphors whose metaphorical nature their practitioners have not recognized. The mind-body dualism, the subject-object distinction, the separation of reason from emotion, the transcendence of moral law — all rest on metaphorical structures that the embodied-cognition framework reveals as constructed rather than foundational. The book was simultaneously a work of cognitive linguistics and a frontal assault on the disembodied rationalism that had dominated Western philosophy for two and a half millennia.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's method is to identify specific conceptual metaphors underlying specific philosophical positions and to show how the metaphors determine the positions' entailments. Descartes's radical separation