Livro: Metáforas da Vida Cotidiana George Lakoff e Mark Johnson

Metáforas da Vida Cotidiana
George Lakoff e Mark Johnson
Editora: Mercado de Letras
Título original: Metaphors We Live By




A publicação, no mercado editorial brasileiro, de uma obra que sacudiu o mundo acadêmico lá fora e que já garantiu seu lugar como um "clássico" é sempre ocasião de júbilo. Aqueles que se incumbem da tarefa de historiar os rumos das pesquisas sobre o fenômeno da Metáfora desde os primórdios dos tempos, terão forçosamente de referir-se à obra de George Lakoff e Mark Johnson como um importante divisor de águas. Pois o que esses dois estudiosos fizeram foi nada mais nada menos que colocar em cheque todo um modo de pensar sobre a metáfora que a considerava um simples adereço do pensamento - embelezador quando utilizado com cautela, enganador e traiçoeiro quando usado de forma descuidada como se o pensamento propriamente dito pudesse funcionar perfeitamente sem ela. Desafiando a longa tradição, que deita suas raízes nas obras de Aristóteles e mesmo no pensamento do seu mestre, Platão, que faz questão de expulsar os poetas da República dos seus sonhos os autores deste livro sustentam a tese de que, longe de serem fenômenos marginais, as metáforas são de importância vital para o próprio funcionamento da mente humana, uma vez que sem a sua atuação constante, o pensamento em si se tornaria impossível. Ora, as implicações da tese defendida por Lakoff e Johnson vão muito longe, já que dizem respeito não apenas à linguagem, mas, sim, à própria atividade de cognição. Esta, segundo os autores, não se processa de forma desvinculada da linguagem, por um lado, e da nossa maneira de lidar com o mundo, por outro. Para os autores dessa tese bastante original e ousada, as nossas metáforas mais fundamentais são, todas elas, diretamente ligadas às nossas percepções do mundo, a começar pela nossa relação com nosso próprio corpo. Ou seja, a mente e o corpo não são tão independentes como quer a longa tradição metafísica do mundo ocidental, tradição essa consagrada pelo cartesianismo. O começo de toda a atividade cognitiva seria a experiência humana de lidar com o mundo externo.

Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions—that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal—that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body—not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosopy as it has never been seen before.re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosopy as it has never been seen before.re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosopy as it has never been seen before. www.ciadanilima.com.br