Book completed

[eve_prime]

Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding, by Mark Johnson. Mark is an emeritus professor of philosophy at our local university, with whom I am thrilled to be on a first-name basis. I discovered a few months ago that I hadn't bought one of his books, so I added it to my collection, and then it turned out to look potentially useful for my current writing project. One of Mark's main projects has been to develop the philosophy side of what he refers to as "second-generation cognitive science," in which the findings of neuroscience support a new understanding that knowledge, understanding, and even truth are all understood by way of our bodies' experiences, rather than being part of some disembodied pure reality - this goes counter to the project of much of 20th century philosophy, but makes a lot of sense for evolutionary reasons. Why would we develop all of those systems twice, once to deal with our bodies and once to deal with the mental world? As Mark explains, "mind" is never separate from "body" - it's an emergent process of bodies living in environments.