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

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 body, Mark Johnson points out that 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 a 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.

"There are books—few and far between—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."—Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle