Reading Minds The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science [Paperback]

The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure.

Mark Turneris Professor of English at the University of Maryland. His books includeDeath Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism(Chicago). Works such as [this] form the vanguard of our understanding; from the research front, they signal the presence of new and more fruitful relationships between the sciences and rhetorical and literary studies. ---Alan G. Gross,College English The author demonstrates how a new revolution in critical thought demands an understanding of how humans think; this is more than knowing about neurons and synapses, however. A thoughtful book for those of us tired of trying to find the humanity in postmodern criticism. A philosophically sophisticated work that goes a long way toward an empirically responsible account of the bodily and imaginative bases of concepts, meaning, reasoning, and language. ---Mark L. Johnson,Review of Metaphysics