Lakoff, George

George is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute. While some of his work involves conventional issues in linguistics, such as the conditions under which any given linguistic construction is deemed to be grammatically viable, he is particularly well known for his views about the centrality of “metaphor” to human thinking, political behavior and society. Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely a linguistic construction. George argued that metaphors are primarily a conceptual construction, and indeed are central to the development of thought. Undergirding much of his philosophy is his concept of the "embodied mind," which he suggests affects all human constructs including mathematics. Embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism as needed for mind, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details" of “low-level” brain systems. More recently he has applied his work to politics and became something of guru in the Democratic Party. He is author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Don't Think of an Elephant, and Thinking Points. He is co-author of Metaphors We Live By; Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge To The Western Tradition, and Where Mathematics Comes From.