The Aesthetics of Normative Meaning and Thought: The Normative Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, and Art

Preview: /Review: Mark Johnson, The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, and Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 293 pages./ In The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, and Art, Mark Johnson seeks to expand his earlier work with George Lakoff in developing conceptual metaphor theory as well as expanding upon his single authored work on embodied experience. Drawing upon elements of his earlier works, Johnson argues that our lived experience of the world proceeds from our bodies, our nervous systems in specific. In so doing, Johnson reasserts his earlier claims, developed with Lakoff and extended in his philosophical work subsequent to The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought, that the whole of our conceptual experience with the world proceeds from our perceptive, affective, proprioceptive, and cognitive systems all of which operate in interaction with the environment to give rise to our cognition which is made manifest through our deployment of metaphor. It is in service of providing an empirical background for these claims that The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought draws upon recent work in neuroscience and cognitive science, in combination with recent developments in Pragmatism to not only further explain Johnson’s claims with regards to embodied experience, but to expand upon them.