期刊名称：Green Theory & Praxis : The Journal of Ecopedagogy
印刷版ISSN：1941-0948
出版年度：2008
卷号：4
期号：2
页码：1-10
出版社：Ecopedagogy Association International
摘要：George Lakoff and Mark Johnson intended to radically change one of the dominant traditions of Western philosophy, which is the tradition of abstract theory that stretches from the ancient Greeks down through the writings of the contemporary analytic philosophers. In place of de-contextualized and thus culturally uniformed theories about the nature of reality, mind, language, and individualism, Lakoff and Johnson proposed that the task of the philosopher is to clarify how the metaphorical basis of language, and thus systems of knowing, originates in the embodied experience of individuals. Their agenda is summed up in the title of their major book, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999). While they make a cogent case against the many ways in which Western philosophers have framed the process of reasoning, the Lakoff and Johnson theory's reduction of reasoning to individuals sensorimotor processes is itself extreme and dangerous. After critiquing this position, I conclude that the main challenge will be for philosophers and social theorists such as Lakoff and Johnson to explain the dangers of accepting without question the root metaphors that were constituted before there was an awareness of ecological limits and to explain, in ways that can be widely understood, how our everyday vocabulary in the West needs to be framed by analogs that are culturally and ecologically informed.
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