Riccardo De Biase

Through a transdisciplinary lens, this book offers a unique description of how metaphors inform our conceptual system and shape our world accordingly. Metaphors in action means marking a break from conventional methodologies: observing metaphors as they operate reveals how conceptual mappings serve as interpretive tools, directing perception, limiting reasoning patterns, and either enabling or hindering comprehension in practical situations. This collection guides through an exploration of how metaphors exhibit consistency with the cultural contexts and value systems from which they emerge. We examine metaphor as a "semantic network", a framework that immediately suggests new pathways for generating alternative ontological possibilities. This book explores the role and significance of metaphors and the landscapes they shape in five disparate fields: philosophy, linguistics, law, health and digital technologies. This volume is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in philosophy, health sciences, psychology, and the digital humanities.

The author develops some preliminary considerations and commentary on the essay on the evolution of Rene´ Descartes’ thought written in 1896-1897 by the German philosopher Paul Natorp. In the essay Natorp re-examines critically both Descartes’ philosophy and his own previous interpretation of it, outlined in the monograph Descartes’ Erkenntnistheorie. Eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des Kritizismus, where the French philosopher was portraited as the true great forerunner of Kantian criticism. In the essay Natorp clearly speaks of Descartes’ “metaphysical relapse” from his native critical impulse to the “coarse dualism” of the Meditationes de prima philosophia. According to Natorp, the real difference between the “first” and the “second” Descartes depends on the new notion of Substance expounded in the Meditationes, which makes “God’s truthfulness” the only absolute standard of truth.