Towards the end of Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, it seems somewhat surprising that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson should, after several hundred pages of cognitive science and its potential effects on linguistics and analytic philosophy, invoke the work of Michel Foucault with regard to their project. And yet, Foucault it is whose name appears in their argument. The Frenchman has, they say, been their forerunner in arguing throughout his works that

we are greatly constrained in the way we can think. The cognitive unconscious is a principal locus of power in the Foucaultian sense, power over how we can think and how we can conceive of the world. Our unconscious conceptual systems, which structure the cognitive unconscious, can limit how we can think and guarantee that we could not possibly have the kind of autonomy that Kant ascribed to us.[1]

Now, although Lakoff and Johnson’s work perhaps sits uneasily within many philosophers’ definitions of what philosophy is, or, perhaps better, what philosophy is supposed to do, their work at the very least points to an attempt to find common ground between philosophy and cognitive science.