In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources.
           

Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world.

 

“This is a marvelous book that offers a spirited defense of the importance of bodily-based feeling in human meaning-making. Grounding his argument firmly in the philosophy of John Dewey, Johnson creates a new vision of the aesthetics of human understanding that is supported by contemporary research from linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of human cognition. Yet Johnson also provides beautiful examples of how artistic practices exhibit and extend the embodied mind. The Meaning of the Body is a cutting-edge treatise reflecting the newest developments on the mind-body and mind-world problems and properly places aesthetics center stage in the study of meaning and understanding. Read this book and feel what it means!”