The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding

Mark Johnson

jun 2012 · University of Chicago Press

Acerca de este libro electrónico

In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources.
Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics

Calificaciones y opiniones

The meaning of the body es un libro muy importante porque nos presenta una nueva visión de la relación del cuerpo con la mente, su ruptura con los dualismos y los procesos de construcción de sentido a través de la experiencia, en conexión con una "codificación" de la experiencia en cuanto a una abstracción de relaciones espaciales de manera análoga y estructurada. Nos aclara que los esquemas de imagen son patrones continuos y análogos de la experiencia y el entendimiento, con la suficiente estructura interna para permitir o limitar la realización de inferencias. Pese a su complejidad, es un gran aporte a la psicología de carácter cognitivo

Acerca del autor

Mark Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason and Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics and coauthor, with George Lakoff, of Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.