Abstract: (from the jacket) "The Body in the Mind" explores the ways that meaning, understanding, and rationality arise from and are conditioned by the patterns of our bodily experience. In emphasizing the role of the body, Mark Johnson offers a corrective to dominant theories of meaning in Western philosophy, which have maintained a strictly abstract, propositional account of meaning detached from persons or experience. Expanding on his work with George Lakoff in the pathbreaking book Metaphors We Live By, Johnson presents here an extended philosophical account, exposing the inadequacies of the objectivist philosophical tradition in its rigid separation of mind from body, cognition from emotion, and reason from imagination. He develops a constructive theory of the ways in which imagination links cognitive and bodily structures.

Contents:
     Preface.
     Acknowledgments.
     Introduction: The context and nature of this study.
     The need for a richer account of meaning and reason.
     The emergence of meaning through schematic structure.
     Gestalt structure as a constraint on meaning.
     Metaphorical projections of image schemata.
     How schemata constrain meaning, understanding, and rationality.
     Toward a theory of imagination.
     On the nature of meaning.
     "All this, and realism too ".
     Notes.
     Index.