Professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, and friend of George Lakoff and Mary Ritchie Key.

Offers a serious study of imagination, exploring its role in all meaning, understanding, and reasoning. Expanding the views in "Metaphors We Live By", this "Body in the Mind" is a constructivist reflection on morality. We face moral dilemmas using our imagination grounded in the wisdom of collective experience with our bodies in common.

Johnson sees the modern theories of Meaning and Rationality in a state of "crisis". He makes three claims about the central role of imagination to address the emergency:
1. Meaning. Without imagination, nothing in the world could be meaningful.
2. Understanding. Without imagination, we cannot make sense of experience.
3. Reasoning. Without imagination, we cannot reason toward knowledge of reality.

I found Johnson's willingness to look at the basis of morality, with its pitfalls of absolutism and relativism, a refreshing reflection. Johnson looks to the body as common ground and the origin of imagination. He expands Kant's exploration of the role of imagination in reflective judgments--its role in judgments of natural and artistic beauty, and in teleological reasoning. [158]

Johnson demonstrates the "bodily basis" of meaning-making metaphor which constitute our image schemata. Interestingly, he does not mention Religion or God in the construction of our meaning-making metaphors. ( )