Grasping Philosophy by the Roots

Abstract

eductionism has a tattered reputation; its promise of simplicity is suspect. Yet the power of an explanation lies precisely in identify- ing that level of analysis at which simplicity is genuinely illuminating. Philosophy may seem an unlikely candidate for such a project; it cultivates abstruseness as a measure of sophistication, and surely its unwieldy subject matter deserves no less. There is, then, something refreshingly shameless about Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy In the Flesh, extravagantly subtitled The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. It sets out to give us a clear window into the structure of philosophical thinking itself, into the spreading lines of reasoning that have patterned this millennial search for a truth that can be formulated. Can it deliver? The hidden engines that construct philosophical edifices, the au- thors suggest, are not the ones that spring first to mind. Philosophical ideas are not systematically assembled out of meticulous observations, drawn up within a mathematical order of abstract reason, or serendipitously manifested in an unmediated glimpse of truth. Nor are our ideas of the mind and of the cosmos, of causality and morality, arbitrary inventions ex nihilo, acts of the creative will. Nor yet are they simply cultural constructions, pawns of concealed political agendas.