What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What istruth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these havestood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. Inaddressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamentalassumptionsthat we can know our own minds by introspection, thatmost of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason isdisembodied and universalthat are now called into question bywell-established results of cognitive science. It has been shownempirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no directconscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Ourideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observethem in any simple way. Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical.Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature oftime, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavilyon basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literalin our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptuallyim
