Mark Johnson

I. Embodied Cognition

My interest in embodiment originally grew out of my work with George Lakoff on the nature of conceptual metaphors that define virtually all of our abstract concepts. We found that the source domains of these systematic metaphors typically involved aspects of our sensory-motor experience, such as the coactivation of our perception of changing in verticality correlated with judgments about changes in quantity, giving rise to the MORE IS UP metaphor. Considerations of this sort led me to think about the role of the body in the constitution of human meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. Lakoff and I hypothesized that what we called “image schemas” – such as VERTICALITY, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, BALANCE, CONTAINMENT, FORCE, INTENSITY, and so forth, play a key role in the structuring of our concrete and abstract concepts. I published some of this work in my book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987) and later with Lakoff in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999). In this latter book, we surveyed empirical evidence for the body bases of meaning and concepts, and we began to explore some of the emerging neuroscience evidence for this embodied cognition view.

Courses:

PHIL 407/507: Seminar: Sources of Self (Part 1 | Part 2)

An interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of the “self” and its “identity” that draws on perspectives ranging over cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, narrative theory, recognition theory, phenomenology, disability theory, and theories of power, race,
gender, and culture.

PHIL 607: Seminar: Philosophy and Cognitive Science

An ongoing investigation into the implications of empirical research from the cognitive sciences for our understanding of the nature of mind, self, thought, meaning, and values. I take an “embodied cognition” approach to issues of mind, thought, and language.

PHIL 625: Philosophy of Language

This graduate-level course includes speech act theory and recent work on the embodied and imaginative character of meaning and language.

Books:

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (co-author George Lakoff), Basic Books, 1999

The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Articles:

“What Makes a Body?” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 22, no. 3 (2008), 159-169.

“The Stone that was Cast Out Shall Become the Cornerstone: The Bodily Aesthetics of Human Meaning,” Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 6, no. 2 (2007), 89-103.

"Mind Incarnate: From Dewey to Damasio,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 135: no. 3 (Summer 2006), 46-54.

“Cowboy Bill rides Herd on the Range of Consciousness,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16: no. 4 (2002), 256-263.”

“Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism,” (co-author George Lakoff), Cognitive Linguistics, 13: no. 3 (2002), 245-263.

“Incarnate Mind,” Minds and Machines, 5, No. 4 (1995), 533-545.

“Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Structures of Meaning,” Philosophical Psychology, 6, no. 4 (1993), 413-422.

“Why Cognitive Semantics Matters to Philosophy,” Cognitive Linguistics, 4, No. 1 (1993), 62-74.

”Philosophical Implications of Cognitive Semantics,” Cognitive Linguistics, 3, No. 4 (1992), 345-366.

“Knowing Through the Body,” Philosophical Psychology 4, No. 1 (1991), 3-18.

Book Chapters:

“Cognitive Science and Dewey’s Theory of Mind, Thought, and Language,” The Cambridge Companion to John Dewey, M. Cochran (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 123-144.

“The Meaning of the Body,” Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness, W. Overton, U. Mueller, & J. Newman (eds.). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008, 19-43.

“Philosophy’s Debt to Metaphor,” The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, R. Gibbs (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 39-52.

“The Embodied Mind and the Illusion of Disembodied Thoughts,” The Mind, the Body, and the World: Psychology After Cognitivism?, B. Wallace, A. Ross, J. Davies, T. Anderson (eds.). Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007, 33-48.

“We are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive Organism,” (co-author Tim Rohrer), Body, Language, and Mind, Vol. 1: Embodiment. T. Ziemke, J. Zlatev, R. Frank, R. Dirven, (eds). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2007, 17-54.

“Cognitive Science,” A Companion to Pragmatism, J. Shook and J. Margolis (eds.). London: Blackwell (2006), 369-377.

“Embodied Reason,” Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, Gail Weiss and Honi Haber, eds. London: Routledge, 1999, 81-102.

"Embodied Meaning and Cognitive Science,” Language Beyond Postmoderism, David Levin (ed.), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997, 148-168.

“The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition,” Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, S. Küchler and W. Melion (eds.). Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 74-86.