Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh

I've seen some mentions lately of George Lakoff in political news,
of the Rockridge Institute and his book Don't Think of an Elephant.

But this John Brockman interview really got my attention.

Excerpts:

What we discovered was fascinating: Each major philosopher seems to take a small number of metaphors as eternal and self-evident truths and then, with rigorous logic and total systematicity, follows out the entailments of those metaphors to their conclusions wherever they lead. They lead to some pretty strange places.

Plato's metaphors entail that philosophers should govern the state. Aristotle's metaphors entail that there are four causes and that there cannot be a vacuum. Descartes' metaphors entail that the mind is completely disembodied and that all thought is conscious. Kant's metaphors lead to the conclusions that there is a universal reason and that it dictates universal moral laws.

These and other positions taken by those philosophers are not random opinions. They are consequences of taking commonplace metaphors as truths and systematically working out the consequences.

and

We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.

Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. This is what we have to theorize with. Is it adequate to understand the world scientifically?