"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
"The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it's never gone away. We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool.' What we're saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." — Hugh Kenner, Johns Hopkins University "In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important." — Norman Holland, University of Florida
Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word "freedom." The United States can strike preemptively because "freedom is on the march." Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. In the 2005 presidential inaugural speech, the words "freedom," "free," and "liberty" were used forty-nine times. "Freedom" is one of the most contested words in American political discourse, the keystone to the domestic and foreign policy battles that are racking this polarized nation. For many Democrats, it seems that President Bush's use of the word is meaningless and contradictory—deployed opportunistically to justify American military action abroad and the curtailing of civil liberties at home. But in Whose Freedom?, George Lakoff, an adviser to the Democratic party, shows that in fact the right has effected a devastatingly coherent and ideological redefinition of freedom. The conservative revolution has remade freedom in its own image and deployed it as a central weapon on the front lines of everything from the war on terror to the battles over religion in the classroom and abortion. In a deep and alarming analysis, Lakoff explains the mechanisms behind this hijacking of our most cherished political idea—and shows how progressives have not only failed to counter the right-wing attack on freedom but have failed to recognize its nature. Whose Freedom? argues forcefully what progressives must do to take back ground in this high-stakes war over the most central idea in American life.
The World Fantasy Award–winning anthology featuring an original Game of Thrones novella and new stories from Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, and many more. The twenty-one stories in Dangerous Women showcase some of the best and bravest female characters from across genre fiction—from women warriors and fighter pilots to female serial killers, superheroes, wizards, and bandits. With work from twelve New York Times bestsellers, readers will discover a new Outlander story by Diana Gabaldon, a tale of Harry Dresden’s world by Jim Butcher, a story from Lev Grossman set in the world of The Magicians, and an original novella by George R. R. Martin about the Dance of the Dragons, the vast civil war that tore Westeros apart nearly two centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones. Also included are original stories of dangerous women—heroines and villains alike—by Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Lawrence Block, Carrie Vaughn, S. M. Stirling, Sharon Kay Penman, and many others.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
A rich, nuanced exploration of women's anger from a diverse group of writers Women are furious, and we're not keeping it to ourselves any longer. We're expected to be composed and compliant, but in a world that would strip us of our rights, disparage our contributions, and deny us a seat at the table of authority, we're no longer willing to quietly seethe behind tight smiles. We're ready to burn it all down. In this ferocious collection of essays, twenty-two writers explore how anger has shaped their lives: author of the New York Times bestseller The Empathy ExamsLeslie Jamison confesses that she used to insist she wasn't angry -- until she learned that she was; Melissa Febos, author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir Abandon Me, writes about how she discovered that anger can be an instrument of power; editor-in-chief of Bitch Media Evette Dionne dismantles the "angry Black woman" stereotype; and more. Broad-ranging and cathartic, Burn It Down is essential reading for any woman who has scorched with rage -- and is ready to claim her right to express it.
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.
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires. Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire. California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.
The “propulsive and mesmerizing” (The New York Times) story collection by the International Booker–shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Our Share of Night—now with a new short story. The short stories of Mariana Enriquez are: “The most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro “Violent and cool, told in voices so lucid they feel spoken.”—The Boston Globe (Best Books of the Year) Electric, disturbing, and exhilarating, the stories of Things We Lost in the Fire explore multiple dimensions of life and death in contemporary Argentina. Each haunting tale simmers with the nation's troubled history, but among the abandoned houses, black magic, superstitions, lost loves and regrets, there is also friendship, compassion, and humor. Translated by the National Book Award-winning Megan McDowell, these “slim but phenomenal” (Vanity Fair) stories ask the biggest questions of life and show why Mariana Enriquez has become one of the most celebrated new voices in global literature.
An updated third edition of the modern classic that applies cognitive science to the world of politics—to explain how our unconscious views shape our votes. When Moral Politics was first published, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff’s classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality. Even more so than when Lakoff wrote, liberals and conservatives simply have very different, deeply held beliefs about what is right and wrong. Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are unconscious—part of our hard-wired brain circuitry. When confronted with facts that don’t fit our moral worldview, our brains work automatically and unconsciously to ignore or reject these facts, and it takes extraordinary openness and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the countless facts we’re presented with each day. For this edition, Lakoff has added a new preface and afterword, extending his observations to various ideological conflicts since the book’s original publication, from the Affordable Care Act to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 financial crisis, and the effects of global warming. One might have hoped such massive changes and challenges would bring people together, but the reverse has actually happened; the divide between liberals and conservatives has become stronger and more virulent. To have any hope of bringing mutual respect to the current social and political divide, we need to clearly understand the problem and make it part of our contemporary public discourse. Moral Politics offers a much-needed wake-up call to both the left and the right. “An intelligent take on the way politics is conducted in America.” —Publishers Weekly “That conservatives and liberals see the world differently comes as no news to most, but Lakoff’s look into just why that should be so makes for interesting reading.” —Kirkus Reviews
