Faculty Logo Mark L. Johnson Mark L. Johnson Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy 1295 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1295 markj@uoregon.edu (541) 346-5548 :Office (541) 346-5544 :FAX CURRENT RESEARCH My co-authored book with George Lakoff entitled Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999) investigates the changes in our conception of philosophy that come from taking seriously the way meaning, concepts, thought, and language are tied to bodily experience. What I find particularly interesting is the ways in which patterns of our sensory-motor experience play a crucial role in what we can think and how we think. This has led me to pay special attention to what have traditionally been called the "aesthetic" dimensions of experience, meaning, and action. My current major project is thus an exploration of the way aesthetic aspects structure every dimension of our experience and understanding. They are what give form, significance, and value to our lives. So, I'm working on what these aesthetic dimensions are and how they build up meaning and understanding for us. Like Dewey, I'm claiming that all our abstract conceptualization and reasoning, all our thought and language, all our symbolic expression and interaction, are tied intimately to our embodiment and to the pervasive aesthetic characteristics of all experience. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS A. Books Metaphors We Live By (co-author George Lakoff, University of Chicago, 1980. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, University of Minnesota, 1981. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Univeristy of Chicago, 1987. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, University of Chicago, 1993. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, (co-author George Lakoff), Basic Books, 1999. B. Selected Articles "Kant's Unified Theory of Beauty," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37, No.2 (Winter 1979), 167-178. "Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language," (co-author George Lakoff) Journal of Philosophy, 77, No. 8 (1980), 453-486. "The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System," (co-author George Lakoff) Cognitive Science, 4, (1980), 195-208. Reprinted in Perspectives in Cognitive Science, (Donald A. Norman, ed. Lawrence Erlbaum) (1981), 193-206. "Toward a New Theory of Metaphor," (co-author Glenn Erickson) Southern Journal of Philosophy, 18, No. 3 (1980), 289-299. "Metaphor and Communication," (co-author George Lakoff) Linguistic Agency, University of Trier, Paper No. 97, December 1982. "Metaphorical Reasoning," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 21, No. 3 (1983), 371-389. "Imagination in Moral Judgment," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 46, No. 2 (1985), 265-280. "The Metaphorical Logic of Rape," (co-author George Lakoff), Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 2, No. 1 (1987), 73-79. "Embodied Knowledge," Curriculum Inquiry, 19, No. 4 (1989), 361-377. "Knowing Through the Body," Philosophical Psychology, 4, No. 1 (1991), 3-18. "Image-schematic Bases of Meaning," RSSI (Recherches Smiotique Semiotic Inquiry), 9, Nos. 1-2-3 (1989), 109-118. "Philosophical Implications of Cognitive Semantics," Cognitive Linguistics, 3, No. 4 (1992), 345-366. "Why Cognitive Semantics Matters to Philosophy," Cognitive Linguistics, 4, No. 1 (1993), 62-74. "Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Structures of Meaning," Philosophical Psychology, 6, no. 4 (1993), 413-422. "Incarnate Mind," Minds and Machines, 5, No. 4 (1995), 533-545. "Why Metaphor Matters to Philosophy," Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10, No. 3 (1995), 157-62. "Attention Metaphors: How Metaphors Guide the Cognitive Psychology of Attention," (Co-author Diego Fernandez-Duque), Cognitive Science, 23: No.1 (1999), 83-116. "Embodied Musical Meaning," Theory and Practice, 22-23 (1997-98), 95-102. "Cause and Effect Theories of Attention: The Role of Conceptual Metaphors," (co-author, Diego Fernandez-Duque), General Review of Psychology, 6: No. 2 (2002), 153-165. "Law Incarnate," Brooklyn Law Review, 67: No. 4 (Summer 2002), 949-962. C. Chapters in Books "A Philosophical Perspective on the Problem of Metaphor," in Cognition and Figurative Language, R. Hoffman and R. Honeck, Hillsdale (eds.), New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980. "The Rationality of Creativity in Science," (co-author, Nancy Tuana), in Essays on Creativity and Science, Diane DeLuca (ed.), Hawaii Council of Teachers of English, 1986, 225-235. "Some Constraints on Embodied Analogical Understanding," inAnalogical Reasoning: Perspectives of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy, David Helman (ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, 25-40. "The Emergence of Meaning in Bodily Experience," in The Presence of Feeling in Thought, Marcia Moen and B. den Ouden (eds.), SUNY Press, in press. "The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition," in Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, S. Kchler and W. Melion (eds.). Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 74-86. "How Moral Psychology Changes Moral Philosophy," Mind and Morals, L. May, A. Clarke, M. Friedman (eds), (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 45-68. "Embodied Meaning and Cognitive Science," in Language Beyond Postmoderism, David Levin (ed.), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997, 148-168. "Metaphor," Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 208-212. "Ethics," in A Companion to Cognitive Science, W. Bechtel and G. Graham, eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 691-701. "Embodied Reason," in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, Gail Weiss and Honi Haber, eds. London: Routledge, 1999, 81-102. "Metaphor-based Values in Scientific Models," Model-based Reasoning: Science, Technology, Values, L. Magnani and N. Nersessian, eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002, 1-19. TEACHING INTERESTS I have been fortunate to teach topics in several areas of philosophy and to be involved in a considerable amount of interdisciplinary collaboration. One cluster of courses centers around issues of cognition, meaning, and language and includes Philosophy of Language, Metaphor, and Philosophy and Cognitive Science. My Philosophy of Language course includes speech act theory and recent work on the embodied and imaginative character of meaning and language. The seminar on Philosophy and Cognitive Science is an ongoing investigation of how empirical research from the cognitive sciences has profound implications for our understanding of philosophy. A second focus is the philosophy of art, including courses in aesthetics, philosophy of art, and music and meaning. A third area is Kant studies, where I regularly teach one course on Kant's Moral Theory and another on Kant's Aesthetic Theory. I'm particularly interested in his treatment of imagination and reflective judgment. I do my best to defend Kant against facile criticisms, but I do not hesitate to suggest aspects of Kant's views that need to be reconstructed in light of recent work on mind and language. In my fourth area, moral philosophy, besides the course on Kant's ethics I offer a seminar on Recent Moral Theory that emphasizes work over the past three decades. Most recently my focus has been on naturalistic views of ethics. Finally, I have an abiding interest in American Philosophy, especially Pragmatism. Although I've never taught a course on Pragmatism, I often incorporate pragmatist writings into my courses. For example, in my Recent Moral Theory seminar I included Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, as a basis for thinking about ethical naturalism. COURSE LINKS PHIL 101 Philosophical Problems PHIL 441 Philosophy of Art [grenline.gif] U Oregon Logo [Home] [Faculty] [Traditions] [Areas of Specialization] [Departmental Concentrations] [Undergraduate Program] [Graduate Program] [Courses] [Events] [Staff] [Links of Interest] [Site Map]