Synopses & Reviews
What is the difference between right and wrong? This is no easy question to answer, yet we constantly try to make it so, frequently appealing to some hidden cache of cut-and-dried absolutes, whether drawn from God, universal reason, or societal authority. Combining cognitive science with a pragmatist philosophical framework in
Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, Mark Johnson argues that appealing solely to absolute principles and values is not only scientifically unsound but even morally suspect. He shows that the standards for the kinds of people we should be and how we should treat one anotherwhich we often think of as universalare in fact frequently subject to change. And we should be okay with that. Taking context into consideration, he offers a remarkably nuanced, naturalistic view of ethics that sees us creatively adapt our standards according to given needs, emerging problems, and social interactions.
Ethical naturalism is not just a revamped form of relativism. Indeed, Johnson attempts to overcome the absolutist-versus-relativist impasse that has been one of the most intractable problems in the history of philosophy. He does so through a careful and inclusive look at the many ways we reason about right and wrong. Much of our moral thought, he shows, is automatic and intuitive, gut feelings that we follow up and attempt to justify with rational analysis and argument. However, good moral deliberation is not limited merely to intuitive judgments supported after the fact by reasoning. Johnson points out a crucial third element: we imagine how our decisions will play out, how we or the world would change with each action we might take. Plumbing this imaginative dimension of moral reasoning, he provides a psychologically sophisticated view of moral problem solving, one perfectly suited for the embodied, culturally embedded, and ever-developing human creatures that we are.
Review
“In Morality for Humans, Johnson has his hands on what counts in life: how moral appraisals are not separate from intelligence, aesthetic sensibility, flexibility, imagination, or creativity. In fact, that is how the book unfolds, by showing the interrelationship of these constructs. The end is human flourishing, respect for the unifying sensibilities of our experiences and their complexities, and a positive sense of well-being.”
Review
“Morality for Humans is a deep and important book on ethics and on the cognitive science of morality. Mark Johnson is a well-known founder of the movement for empirically responsible ethics that began in the early 1990s, and in Morality for Humans he manages to synthesize his seminal work on moral imagination, metaphor, analogical reasoning, and practical problem-solving with deep thinking about how morality connects with the larger project of living meaningfully, with purpose, in a way that matters and makes a difference. At a time when too much moral psychology is absorbed with brain scans of college students solving ecologically invalid dilemmas about runaway trolleys, Johnsons is a mature work that examines morality in the human ecologies in which it resides and provides wisdom about the contours of a good human life.”
Review
“Morality for Humans is an original work of philosophy, soundly researched and clearly argued. Johnson effectively critiques our traditional views of morality and moral reasoning as seriously flawed because they rely on faulty and outdated views of human nature, moral psychology, and reasoning. He provides instead a stimulating picture of morality as involving open inquiry that requires imagination rather than fixed, absolute rules. Johnson is a distinguished philosopher, and this book represents a worthy addition to his corpus and to philosophical reflection on the important relations between embodied mind and morality.”
Review
and#8220;Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamentaland#8212;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.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;In
The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson does an amazingly good job showing the philosophical import of the notion of embodied cognition. Many authors get caught up in the details and forget to come back to the broader philosophical issues. Johnson, in contrast, paints strokes that outline the implications for our philosophical understanding of meaning, reason, abstract conceptualization, truth, beauty, and the very nature of philosophy.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;This is a marvelous book that offers a spirited defense of the importance of bodily-based feeling in human meaning-making. Grounding his argument firmly in the philosophy of John Dewey, Johnson creates a new vision of the aesthetics of human understanding that is supported by contemporary research from linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of human cognition. Yet Johnson also provides beautiful examples of how artistic practices exhibit and extend the embodied mind. The Meaning of the Body is a cutting-edge treatise reflecting the newest developments on the mind-body and mind-world problems and properly places aesthetics center stage in the study of meaning and understanding. Read this book and feel what it means!and#8221;
Review
"This book continues a lively and interesting debate about the nature of human beings and their awareness of themselves and the world around them."
Review
"A courageous and ultimately successful book. Not only does Johnson attack a number of problematic core assumptions in analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but he moves beyond them to offer an insightful theory of how we can still talk meaningfully about meaning. For any philosopher interested in philosophy of mind, language, or aesthetics, this book has a number of important lessons about how these disciplines are in need of revision."
Review
"This fine book is a welcome extension of Mark Johnson's important research about the embodied nature of mental life. It is energetically argued, clearly written, well-structured, admirably wide-ranging, and impressively well informed with respect to current theories in neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive science. It is also enriched with artistic examples and reinforced with the personal passion of earnest commitment to making philosophy relevant to life and to fostering aesthetic values."
Review
"Johnson has laid out the foundations for a theory of meaning which has the potential to unite the purposes and preoccupations of certain strands from both analytical and continental philosophy. . . . This is not to suggest that Johnson retreats from commitment to any one position: quite the contrary. Well-entrenched approaches to a number of philosophical problems are upended. . . . This book should be of intrest to all philosophers as it attempts to reconnect analytical philosophy with lived experience."
Review
“A welcome renewal and defense of John Dewey's ethical naturalism, which Johnson claims is the only morality ‘fit for actual human beings.’ The book straddles the divide between questions in moral psychology—What values do we have? Where did they come from? What role does reason play in moral deliberation?—and questions of normative and metaethics—From where do values get genuine normative authority? How do we properly rank our values when they compete with each other? These questions weave together throughout the book. . . . . He has set the stage for a promising dialogue, and we can look forward to his future contributions to the conversation.”
Review
“Traditionally, moral reasoning has been seen as a matter of conscious analysis—to identify pre-existing moral principles and then apply them. Cognitive science reveals that this cannot be correct, since much moral thinking happens subconsciously. As a result of experiments in moral psychology, many scientists have concluded that intuitive judgements come first, followed later, if at all, by rational justification. That's fine as far as it goes, says Johnson. But he recognises a key third process, which he calls ‘imaginative moral deliberation’—and this is where his real insight comes.”
Synopsis
Mark Johnsons book,
Morality for Humans, argues that our traditional views of morality and moral reasoning are seriously flawed because they rely on faulty and outdated views of human nature, moral psychology, and reasoning. He further argues that moral fundamentalism is not only logically and epistemologically flawed but that it is also morally wrong because it blocks the path of moral inquiry and stifles moral thinking and effective communication about morality. Johnson gives a picture of morality as essentially involved in open inquiry that requires imagination rather than fixed, absolute rules. In making his case, Johnson relies on two main resources: contemporary cognitive science and the moral theory of the philosopher John Dewey, whose major works in moral theory belong to the first part of the twentieth century but, as Johnson argues, are remarkably relevant to philosophical thought today and deeply congruent with current trends in contemporary cognitive science concerning mind and morality. Johnsons book will be of importance to specialists interested in contemporary moral theory and in particular in the relationship of cognitive science to moral theory. It will also appeal to some specialists in philosophy of mind.
Synopsis
"There are booksand#8212;few and far betweenand#8212;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."and#8212;Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation.
Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
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 meaningand#8212;including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphorsand#8212;that are all rooted in the bodyand#8217;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.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;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.and#160;and#8220;Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamentaland#8212;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.and#8221;and#8212;George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics
About the Author
George Lakoff is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of, among other books, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Moral Politics, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Mark Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Body in the Mind and Moral Imagination, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Johnson and Lakoff have also coauthored Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Concepts We Live By
2. The Systematicity of Metaphorical Concepts
3. Metaphorical Systematicity: Highlighting and Hiding
4. Orientational Metaphors
5. Metaphor and Cultural Coherence
6. Ontological Metaphors
7. Personification
8. Metonymy
9. Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence
10. Some Further Examples
11. The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Structuring
12. How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?
13. The Grounding of Structural Metaphors
14. Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical
15. The Coherent Structuring of Experience
16. Metaphorical Coherence
17. Complex Coherences across Metaphors
18. Some Consequences for Theories of Conceptual Structure
19. Definition and Understanding
20. How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form
21. New Meaning
22. The Creation of Similarity
23. Metaphor, Truth, and Action
24. Truth
25. The Myths of Objectivism and Subjectivism
26. The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics
27. How Metaphor Reveals the Limitations of the Myth of Objectivism
28. Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism
29. The Experientialist Alternative: Giving New Meaning to the Old Myths
30. Understanding
Afterword
References