Jordan Zlatev - Böcker

The first volume of the two-volume set Body, Language and Mind focuses on the concept of embodiment, understood in most general terms as "the bodily basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cognition and language". The volume offers a representative, multi- and interdisciplinary state-of-the-art collection of papers on embodiment and brings together a large variety of different perspectives, from cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, semiotics and artificial intelligence. Being envisioned as a reader of sorts in theoretical and empirical research on embodiment, the book revolves around several core issues that have been addressed previously, to a large degree independently, in various disciplines. In particular the volume illustrates the diversity of notions of embodiment that has arisen in various disciplines over the last twenty years, and addresses the question how these different interpretations relate to each other, i.e. are they different aspects of or different perspectives on the same phenomena, or do they actually contradict each other? For this purpose, several aspects of cognition and language, such as phenomenal experience, perception, action, conceptualization, communication, meaning creation, social interaction and culture, are illuminated from the perspective of different theories of embodiment. The contributions are integrated through cross-connections between individual authors’ papers and through an introductory essay that identifies the different strands of research, the central issues that they share, and the synergies that can be gained from addressing embodiment from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Summarizing his life-long engagement with the field of semiotics and extending this with cognitive science and phenomenology into the transdisciplinary science of cognitive semiotics, the author asks key questions like: What is meaning in general and sign use in particular? What is specific about the picture sign? What is communication? The book is divided into three parts, followed by an extensive case study on visual rhetoric. Edited posthumously by his closest colleagues, the book sediments the legacy of Göran Sonesson as one of the leading semioticians of our times. It is bound to become a classic in the fields dedicated to the pursuit of meaning.