The Meaning of the Body
Aesthetics of Human Understanding
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Preface: The Need for an Aesthetics of Human Meaning
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Meaning Is More than Words and Deeper than Concepts
Part I: Bodily Meaning and Felt Sense
1 The Movement of Life
2 Big Babies
3 “Since Feeling Is First”: Emotional Dimensions of Meaning
4 The Grounding of Meaning in the Qualities of Life
5 Feeling William James’s “But”: The Aesthetics of Reasoning and Logic
Part II: Embodied Meaning and the Sciences of Mind
6 The Origin of Meaning in Organism-Environment Coupling: A Nonrepresentational View of Mind
7 The Corporeal Roots of Symbolic Meaning
8 The Brain’s Role in Meaning
9 From Embodied Meaning to Abstract Thought
Part III: Embodied Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art
10 Art as an Exemplar of Meaning-Making
11 Music and the Flow of Meaning
12 The Meaning of the Body
References
Index
“Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”
“In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson does an amazingly good job showing the philosophical import of the notion of embodied cognition. Many authors get caught up in the details and forget to come back to the broader philosophical issues. Johnson, in contrast, paints strokes that outline the implications for our philosophical understanding of meaning, reason, abstract conceptualization, truth, beauty, and the very nature of philosophy.”
Cognitive Science: Human and Animal Cognition
Philosophy: Logic and Philosophy of Language | Philosophy of Mind
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