Philosophy Study Group
Curt Hillstrom
Monday, April 11, 2022 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
At your location, via
Zoom Link
Note that April 11 is not the second Wednesday of the month, the time we have been meeting recently. We will finish discussing the book, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
This is a long book and we hope that you have been able to read as much of it as possible. If you find that you are unable to read the whole thing, feel free to explore what interests you the most and browse the other areas for useful tidbits.
We do have a couple of suggestions, however. One person who has already read the book suggests that you read the last chapter (Chapter 25) first. And you should also have read all of Part I, since this is the foundation of the authors' arguments. Also try to read as much of Part II as you can, since this fills in and gives many examples of what the authors are driving at. Part III takes aim at particular philosophers and philosophical schools. Most reviewers have found this the weakest part of the book, with the exception of the chapter on Noam Chomsky and cognitive linguistics. This is not a great surprise, since the authors come from the language side of cognitive research, and Lakoff, a former student of Chomsky, has been debating this topic with Chomsky for a long time. We hope to do a bit of debating ourselves: if not about cognitive linguistics itself, then about some of the other topics alluded to in this book, such as causality, cognition in general, theories of mind, time, ontology, psychology, classical philosophy, epistemology, experimental philosophy, morality, metaphysics, space, linguistics in general, early modern philosophy, objective reality, analytic philosophy, religion, science, and yesterday's weather.
Note that April 11 is not the second Wednesday of the month, the time we have been meeting recently. We will finish discussing the book, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
This is a long book and we hope that you have been able to read as much of it as possible. If you find that you are unable to read the whole thing, feel free to explore what interests you the most and browse the other areas for useful tidbits.
We do have a couple of suggestions, however. One person who has already read the book suggests that you read the last chapter (Chapter 25) first. And you should also have read all of Part I, since this is the foundation of the authors' arguments. Also try to read as much of Part II as you can, since this fills in and gives many examples of what the authors are driving at. Part III takes aim at particular philosophers and philosophical schools. Most reviewers have found this the weakest part of the book, with the exception of the chapter on Noam Chomsky and cognitive linguistics. This is not a great surprise, since the authors come from the language side of cognitive research, and Lakoff, a former student of Chomsky, has been debating this topic with Chomsky for a long time. We hope to do a bit of debating ourselves: if not about cognitive linguistics itself, then about some of the other topics alluded to in this book, such as causality, cognition in general, theories of mind, time, ontology, psychology, classical philosophy, epistemology, experimental philosophy, morality, metaphysics, space, linguistics in general, early modern philosophy, objective reality, analytic philosophy, religion, science, and yesterday's weather.