People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of the metaphor.

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."--David E. Leary, "American Scientist"

In From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between. Although the cognitive sciences are revealing much about how our brains produce language and thought, we do not yet know exactly how words are understood or have any methodology for finding out. Feldman develops his theory in computer simulations--formal models that suggest ways that language and thought may be realized in the brain. Combining key findings and theories from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology, Feldman synthesizes a theory by exhibiting programs that demonstrate the required behavior while remaining consistent with the findings from all disciplines. <br /> <br /> After presenting the essential results on language, learning, neural computation, the biology of neurons and neural circuits, and the mind/brain, Feldman introduces specific demonstrations and formal models of such topics as how children learn their first words, words for abstract and metaphorical concepts, understanding stories, and grammar (including "hot-button" issues surrounding the innateness of human grammar). With this accessible, comprehensive book Feldman offers readers who want to understand how our brains create thought and language a theory of language that is intuitively plausible and also consistent with existing scientific data at all levels.

Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor, culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly, using lexical data from his database Metalude, investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture, engineering, education, genetics, ecology, economics, politics, industrial time-management, medicine, immigration, race, and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience, so that an apparently universal metaphor such as event-structure as realized in English grammar is, in fact, culturally relative, compared with e.g. the construal of 'cause and effect' in the Algonquin language Blackfoot. Moreover, event-structure as a model is both scientifically reactionary and, as the basis for technological mega-projects, has proved environmentally harmful. Furthermore, the ideologies of early capitalism created or exploited a selection of metaphor themes historically traceable through Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Malthus and Darwin. These metaphorical concepts support neo-Darwinian and neo-conservative ideologies apparent at the beginning of the 21st century, ideologies underpinning our social and environmental crises. The conclusion therefore recommends skepticism of metaphor s reductionist tendencies.

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, many published for the first time, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities.

In this ambitious and wide-ranging text, Andrew Goatly explores the language of metaphor. Combining insights from relevance theory and functional linguistics, he provides a powerful model for understanding how metaphors work in real communicative situations, how we use them to communicate meaning as well as how we process them.

Examining the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, Goatly surveys the means by which metaphors are realized in texts and locates the interpretation of metaphor in its social context. The Language of Metaphors is enlivened by the choice, variety and humor of its real examples which are taken from a wide variety of genres including conversation, popular science, advertising, news reports, novels and poetry. Supplemented with exercises and a suggested reading list, this book will provide students of language, psychology and literature with an invaluable guide to understanding precisely how metaphors function.</P>

"There are books--few and far between--which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."--Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle

The book includes fifteen essays and an interview. The essays are grouped in three parts: Mathematics; Mathematics and Physics; and Language, Consciousness, and Book reviews. Most of the essays are about some aspects of epistemology and the history of sciences, mainly mathematics, physics, and the history of language. English translations of some of the essays, originally published in Russian, appear for the first time in this selection. One of them is the introduction to the book Computable and Uncomputable, where the idea of a quantum computer was first proposed in 1980. Another is an essay on the mythological trickster figure, where the evolutionary role of manipulative behavior is discussed in connection with the problem of the origin of human language. With the foreword by Freeman Dyson, this book will be of interest to anyone interested in the philosophy and history of mathematics, physics, and linguistics.

在线阅读本书
Paul Ricoeur is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished philosophers of our time. In "The Rule of Metaphor" he seeks "to show how language can extend itself to its very limits, forever discovering new resonances within itself". Recognizing the fundamental power of language in constructing the world we perceive, Ricoeur reveals the processes by which linguistic imagination creates and recreates meaning through metaphor. Taking further his acclaimed analysis of the power of myth and symbol, Ricoeur invites us to explore the many layers of language in order to rediscover what that meaning might be.