The roads of thought: Buddhism vs. Western philosophy

By Rodrigo Cáceres Riquelme

The purpose of this essay is to develop a comparative account between two systems of thought existing in today's world: western philosophy and early buddhist philosophy. The main tool of analysis I will be using is to be found in one of my preceding articles called "The partial nature of discourse and ideology". In this article I got to establish a general regularity of language in which discourses and systems of thought are partial, in the sense that they historically commit to a limited set of concepts that highlight specific aspects of events in the world, and when they do so, they fail to consider all other aspects that are left out of their frame of thought. 

Stibbe (2015) puts this succinctly when affirming that "texts and discourses will always be partial, bringing certain elements together into a configuration while leaving out a whole universe of other elements." (p.146). It might be useful to think of discourses and systems of thought as light beams that highlight or shed light upon a limited subset of a scenario (the scenario of the world, if you wish) while naturally downplaying and failing to consider what is left in the darkness.

The first thing that I shall consider to understand these systems of thought is what is the motivating reason that leads to their construction. Then, I will identify what are the most central concepts that characterize them and what are the kinds of thinking patterns, inference patterns and beliefs that these systems lead people to have. 

Western philosophy (at least the one that was able to be preserved through texts) started with the Greeks and was motivated by the central question of what is real and how we can know it, if we can know it. This is where one need to stress that this motivation is already partial and specific. Greek philosophers might as well been motivated to answer how should one act towards fellow humans and animals, but no. These philosophers' concern was primarily theoretical: what is real and how can we know it. We can see then that the central concepts around which western philosophy turns around are the stabilized concepts of 'knowledge', 'reality' and 'truth'. 

This concern for truth has lead Western thought to establish an entrenched theory of truth that affirms that truth amounts to words fitting reality, more known as the correspondence theory of truth. Lakoff & Johnson (1999) extensively demonstrate that this theory is false, in the sense that it tends to assume that the correspondence between words and reality is objective, in other words, that it is independent of human minds and bodies. In other words, when the correspondence between 'words' and 'reality' is thought to be objective, then the person who understands this 'objective meaning' turns to be irrelevant for the account of truth. This idea that concepts have 'inherent meaning' is referred to as the belief that reason is transcendental and disembodied, that the structure of concepts has nothing to do with the particularities of human experience, human bodies and the human brain. 

The demonstration of the falsehood of the correspondence theory of truth is quite extended, but I can provide an example just to get a taste of it. Let's say that I am at a park and I tell you "There is a cat behind that tree", you then see that what I claim is indeed the case and reply "It's true". The intuitive thing to do would be to think that my statement is 'objectively true'. But the key thing to note is that the concept behind arises from the structure of our bodily experience as being spatially oriented with a front and a back, with things in front of us and things behind us. Humans have a stable front/behind orientation because our eyes and movements are usually directed forward, but this is not the case for trees. Trees do not have inherent fronts and backs. What we can note then is that we automatically project our own spatial experience onto the tree in a non-trivial manner. The 'front' of the tree is projected onto the side that is facing us and the 'back' is the opposite side. It is through this kind of projection of spatial understanding that we get this sentence to be 'true', it depends on the structure of our spatial experience, it is not independent or objective in any meaningful sense. Moreover, if the sentence is true for you as a listener it is because we share the same front/back experiential shape and we automatically project fronts and behinds onto objects in an equivalent manner.

At this point, we can see that the western system of thought is enlarged on its main concepts: 'truth', 'reality', 'objective', 'subjective', 'object', 'subject', 'knowledge', 'independent reality', 'reason' and 'inherent'.

There is a number of ramifications that grow out of these main concepts and the implicit beliefs that they lead to affirm, such as the existence of an independent reality and the belief that reason and truth are independent and separate from human experience and human understanding. One of them is that since there is an independent reality where 'things in themselves' exist, then perception is thought to be an 'internal representation' of the external reality of 'things in themselves'. Another ramification is what is referred to as faculty psychology, the idea that we have a 'faculty' of reason that is separate and independent from perception and bodily movement. It is the belief that this 'autonomous' faculty of reason is what makes us essentially human, distinguishing us from all other animals (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).

We can note here the addition of another of the central concepts in Western thought: the concept of 'essence'. Lakoff & Johnson (1999) refer to this contextual belief as the folk theory of essences, that affirms that "every entity has an 'essence' or 'nature', that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behavior." (p.347). The farthest I can retrace the roots of this notion of essence (ousia in Greek) is in Parmenides' thought.

Parmenides was Heraclitus' theoretical opposite, with each of them identifying with the concepts of being and becoming, respectively. Heraclitus believed that nothing in this world was constant, except change and becoming. He was known for comparing the world with an ever-changing river where "everything flows, nothing stands still". Conversely, Parmenides thought that the change or "becoming" we perceive with our senses was deceptive, and that there was a pure perfect and eternal being behind nature. Western philosophy seems to have taken the side of Parmenides, the side of 'what is' and think in terms of substances and not in terms of processes. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers to this when describing that:

Substance metaphysics proceeds from the intuition—first formulated by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides—that being should be thought of as simple, hence as internally undifferentiated and unchangeable. Substance metaphysicians recast this intuition as the claim that the primary units of reality (called “substances”) must be static—they must be what they are at any instant in time.

I claim that Parmenides' thought is connected to the concept of 'essence' because an essence is precisely supposed to be something that is rather permanent, static, unchanging and stable property of a thing. It is also consistent with the belief held by Aristotle and Plato that things in the world were fixed by divine design. At this point it may be worth noting that, for example, the idea of evolution of the species as we understand it from Darwin's work was something unimaginable at the time.

By contrast, if these philosophers would have believed that nothing was constant, that everything is in the process of becoming something else, then it would have had little sense to situate the concepts of 'essence', 'nature' and 'essential' at a central place in their philosophies. But they did, and they articulated these concepts in non-trivial ways. First, they incorporated the belief that the essence of a thing is unique. This is why it does not really make sense to ask 'What are the human essences?', since essence is assumed to be unitary and not multiple.

Moreover, they incorporate an association in which the essence of a thing is assumed to be what distinguishes it from the rest of the things in the universe. In other words, the essence of a thing, what truly makes it what it is, is equivalent to its exclusive and distinctive character. This might sound straightforward because the concept of essence itself implies a motivation to distinguish what is exclusive of things. And it is also intuitive because we normally understand definitions of words as the exercise of distinguishing a concept by referring to the aspects that are distinctive about it.

However, Stibbe (2015) was attentive enough to note that the essence of a thing is not necessarily what is unique and distinctive about it. He notes that the usual way the concept of 'human essence' is used assumes that "what makes us human is to be discovered in our differences from other animals rather than our commonalities" (p.4). In other words, being sensitive, empathizing and loving beings could also be understood as part of our essence, but since we share these traits in some degree with animals, they are ruled out as part of our 'essence'. This is indeed the way the Greeks used this notion. For example, 'human essence' could not have been emotions because we share emotions with the animal kingdom.

Philosophies of 'essence' in the Greek sense are necessarily philosophies of exclusion, because they tend to separate things in the world and think of them as independent from each other. For example, for Aristotle the essence of man was rationality, and he saw woman as an "incomplete man" or a sort of "deformity". These philosophies of 'essence' traditionally entail an assumed 'essential' separation of the rational man from woman, emotions as well as a separation from animals, plants, matter, etc.

Another of the important ramifications of this system of thought is the way in which it is recovered in the age of the European Enlightenment, specially concerning the concept of 'reason'. George Lakoff  (2010) resumes this view as follows:

Most of us were brought up with a commonplace view of how we think that derives from the Enlightenment. Over the past 30 years, the cognitive and brain sciences have shown that this view is false. The old view claimed that reason is conscious, unemotional, logical, abstract, universal, and imagined concepts and language as able to fit the world directly. All of that is false. Real reason is: mostly unconscious (98%); requires emotion; uses the ‘‘logic’’ of frames, metaphors, and narratives; is physical (in brain circuitry); and varies considerably, as frames vary. And since the brain is set up to run a body, ideas and language can’t directly fit the world but rather must go through the body.

This theory of reason as put together in the Enlightenment, condenses some of the main aspects we have been discussing. This concerns the correspondence theory of truth (language fits the world directly), that reason as the exclusive or 'essential' human faculty is independent from the body and emotion, that there is a discontinuity between human understanding and 'universal reason' that is body and mind-free. One of the aspects that gets added in this Enlightement theory of reason is that reason is framed with an understanding of attributes. We think of attributes as things that are possessed by entities, and this entails a dichotomical understanding: whether you have the attribute or you do not have it. If it is said that 'reason is conscious', what is implied is that being conscious is an attribute of reason, which necessarily rules out its opposite, that reason is unconscious.

This belief that human faculties (e.g. reason, will, emotion, movement) are separated and independent from each other is the basis for what is commonly known as somatophobia or hatred of the body. The reasoning goes like this. It starts with the assumption that the ultimate philosophical goal is the quest for truth, and reason is assumed to be the vehicle to attain it. Including the belief that human faculties are separated, we can get the idea that there is a conflict over who takes control of one's actions: reason or the body's desire (emotion, passion, appetite, sexuality). Due to the fact that philosophers privilege reason from their interest in truth, they conceptualize this conflict over control of human action as a combat or fight between reason against body impulses. Bodily desires and emotions are then seen as the enemy that has to be dominated or repressed. This is exactly what Bordo (2004) explains in great detail when analyzing western philosophy. Here is the complete quotation:

First, the body is experienced as alien, as the not-self, the not-me. It it “fastened and glued” to me, “nailed” and “riveted” to me, as Plato describes it in the Phaedo. For Descartes, the body is the brute material envelope for the inner and essential self, the thinking thing; it is ontologically distinct from that inner self, is as mechanical in its operations as a machine, is, indeed, comparable to animal existence.

Second, the body is experienced as confinement and limitation: a “prison,” a “swamp,” a “cage,” a “fog” – all images that occur in Plato, Descartes, and Augustine – from whichh the soul, will, or mind struggles to escape. “The enemy [“the madness of lust”] held my will in his power and from it he made a chain and shackled me,” says Augustine. In the work of all three philosophers, images of the soul being “dragged” by the body are prominent. The body is “heavy, ponderous,” as Plato describes it; it exerts a downward pull.

Third, the body is the enemy, as Augustine explicitly describes it time and again, and as Plato and Descartes strongly suggest in their diatribes against the body as the source of obscurity and confusion in our thinking. “A source of countless distractions by reason of the mere requirement of food,” says Plato; “liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the pursuit of truth; it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in very truth, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body.”

And, finally, whether as an impediment to reason or as the home of the “slimy desires of the flesh” (as Augustine calls them), the body is the locus of all that threatens our attempts at control. It overtakes, it overwhelms, it erupts and disrupts. This situation, for the dualist, becomes an incitement to battle the unruly forces of the body, to show it who is boss. For, as Plato says, “Nature orders the soul to rule and govern and the body to obey and serve.”

All three – Plato, Augustine, and, most explicitly, Descartes – provide instructions, rules, or models of how to gain control over the body, with the ultimate aim – for this is what their regiment finally boils down to – of learning to live without it. By that is meant: to achieve intellectual dependence from the lure of the body’s illusions, to become impervious to its distractions, and, most important, to kill off its hungers and desires (p.144-145).

In this way, we can see that this combat conceptualization of the 'triumph' of reason over the body is historically preserved, creating a historical habit of negative appreciation of one's own body, and a will to repress and deny the embodied aspect of our lives, such as sexuality, emotions and sensations. The consequence is that the people that think in these terms reject a proper investigation of the role of emotion in the human mind, and as they are compelled to repress their feelings, they develop what is usually known in clinical psychology as alexithymia, which consists in difficulties identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal, as well as difficulties describing feelings to other people.

Closely related to this, when Eduardo Kohn (2013) provides his view on Descartes' mind/body dualism, it raises the interesting possibility that Descartes' gesture of denying the existence of his own body might have arisen from a condition phenomenologically similar to alexithymia or to depersonalisation disorder, commonly associated to the feeling of being estranged of one's own body.

These are some of the main aspects of the partial conceptual system of western philosophy and their consequences concerning specific beliefs and attitudes towards aspects of one's own existence. 

I shall now examine the Buddha's system of thought, its concepts and its underlying motivation. My main source is going to be Stephen Batchelor's account of the early buddhist canon. In brief, Batchelor's interpretation seems apt because he tries to reconcile many of the inconsistencies of the established Buddhist traditions that are based on dogmatic acceptance of belief and patriarchal authority, to the point that he claims himself to be a buddhist heretic. His main task is to examine the early writings of the Buddha's record and put together an internally consistent and logical account of this system of thought.

As we know from his story, the Buddha was motivated to leave his dwelling out of the need to provide answers to his ultimate concerns: What is the delight of life? What is the tragedy of life? What is the emancipation of life? After six years of wandering homeless in search for answers, he comes to a final conclusion: "The happiness and joy that arise conditioned by life, that is the delight of life; that life is impermanent, difficult and changing, that is the tragedy of life; the removal and abandonment of grasping for life, that is the emancipation of life."

From this quotation we can already note some of the central concepts in the Buddha's system of thought, which are of course also partial and radically different from those in Western thought, simply because their respective motivations are radically different. These main concepts are: 'impermanent', 'suffering/difficult' (dukkha), 'grasping' (chandarāga), 'conditioned arising'.

It is immediately evident that the Buddha's system of thought has a practical end, because in it he refers to tasks that one must do: remove and abandon grasping for life. Moreover, one of his most famous teachings are the four tasks:

(1) to comprehend suffering (dukkha)

(2) to let go of the arising of reactivity (tanha).

(3) to behold the ceasing of reactivity (tanha) [...] the traceless fading away and ceasing of that reactivity.

(4) To cultivate the eightfold path [...] (Batchelor, p.27)

Another main concept that is added within these four tasks is the complex concept of tahna. It literally translates as "thirst" and it is commonly translated to English as craving or desire. However, Batchelor translates it into reactivity, that is something even more general, which refers to the spontaneous and automatic reactions that arise out of our contact with the environment.

What is referred to through the four tasks is one of the main insights that Buddha achieved through contemplative meditation. He came to the conclusion that he was experiencing something regular, almost like a law: things arise, they stay for a moment and then fade away or cease to be. He concluded that this applied to his emotions (they arise, stay for a while and finally cease to be), his impulses, his thoughts, his memories, his fantasies and his sensations.

What we can already note in contrast to western thought is that some of the central concepts of buddhist thought are concerned with the relationships and attitudes that we, as persons, hold concerning the events we are confronted to: objects, words, theories, impulses, emotions, other people, thoughts, images, sounds, bodily sensations, bodily posture, and so on. The Buddha understood that we tend to identify with and cling (upādāna) to these contents of experience. We cling or attach to what is attractive, to whatever generates positive feelings, which can be people, objects, money, sensations of power or superiority, theories, our own sense of self, one's status in a social hierarchy, etc. And we think of many of these things as 'mine', 'me' or 'part of me'.

We previously examined how emotions and bodily desires are thought to be enemies in the conceptual system of western philosophy and thus westerners believe they need to repress and deny their emotions in order to stay rational. The picture is radically different in buddhism. For one, the concepts of rational or rationality are absent. But was is central is that the state of nirvana is associated to full awareness and recognition of bodily sensations and emotions. This is rendered in one of his conversations with Sivaka, who asks him:

-You talk of a ‘clearly visible dharma,’ sir. In what respects is the
dharma clearly visible, immediate, inviting, uplifting, to be personally
experienced by the wise?

-Let me ask you a question about this. Respond as you see fit.
What do you think: When there is greed within you, do you know
‘there’s greed within me,’ and when there is no greed within you, do
you know ‘there’s no greed within me’?”
-Yes.

-With hatred, delusion, and those qualities of mind associated
with greed, hatred, and delusion, when they are within you, do you
know they are present? And when they are not within you, do you know
they are absent?
-Yes.

-It is in this way that the dharma is clearly visible, immediate,
inviting, uplifting, to be personally experienced by the wise.”

We can see here that the core of nirvana is about qualitative recognition, in other words, the capacity for a complete recognition or awareness of the specific qualities of emotions and sensations that arise in our bodies. Again, this is not a faculty but something that one needs to practice through meditation. It is through practice that one gets connected with the qualitative emotional dynamic occurring in one's body.

Of particular interest was the Buddha's attitude towards claims and theories in language. Since his system of thought was fundamentally practical, he could notice that the people in his environs were concerned with issues that, due to our limitations, we were unable to know for sure. 'There is god' 'there is no god', 'there is life after death', 'there is no life after death'. Claims like these were completely barren and unhelpful for the Buddha because he realized that due to our human limitations, we were not in a position that would allow us to provide a definitive answer to them.

More generally, as he saw the world as constantly changing and impermanent, he could see the basis for dogmatism, noting that there was no point in claiming 'this is' and 'this is not', because 'what is' happens to be in the process of morphing onto something else or ceasing to exist, due to its changing and transient character. "By and large" the Buddha says, "this world relies upon the duality of 'it is' and 'it is not", referring to the situation in which people are disputing themselves over things that they cannot make reference to, like an eternal god or an afterlife.

In this sense, his system of thought is much closer to Heraclitus' thought -who thought that nothing in this world was constant, except change and becoming. This is also the reason why a concept of 'essence' seems alien within the context of the Buddha's system of thought. It is also consistent with the Buddha's view that persons were like an ongoing and unfinished project, a work in progress. This is rendered in one of his discourses:

"Just as a farmer irrigates a field,

An arrowsmith fashions an arrow,

And a carpenter shapes a piece of wood,

So the sage tames his self."

This view of the self is at odds with the corresponding view of western philosophy. In Buddhist philosophy,  personality is plastic and can be modeled, fashioned onto whatever we want to make of it. If we don't water it, then it becomes barren and dead, but if we practice and treat it with great care and resolution, then we can tame and model our own self in order to achieve our purposes. There is nothing essential about a specific self, and any essentialist idea would fail to recognize the plasticity of our self. Concepts like 'nature' and 'essence' would come to make us believe that was has arisen out of historical circumstances is somehow permanent, static, not supposed to be changed.

It is also at odds with framing human faculties as attributes, as when reason is described as 'conscious, logical, unemotional, abstract and universal'. If we are an unfinished work in progress, then it is more adequate to think in terms of potentialities than attributes. In this way, we are not 'conscious' but rather we have the potential of being conscious and aware. This is evident from the Buddha's advice on how to meditate: among his discourses he advises to practice awareness of activities, awareness of bodily posture, awareness of the breath. If awareness is something that we practice, it implicitly means that our starting point is unawareness or unconsciousness. This is rendered in an elegant way by Varela et al. (1993) when they describe that "the first great discovery of mindfulness meditation tends to be not some encompassing insight into the nature of mind but the piercing realization of just how disconnected humans normally are from their very experience". This is at odds with western philosophy and science because it has become normal that 'mind' and 'consciousness' are treated as synonyms. As Lakoff explains, around 98% of our reasoning is unconscious, such that certain scientists refer to this as the 'unbearable automaticity of being' (Bargh and Chartrand, 1993). 

When it comes to the central concepts of craving and clinging, we can note that they are transitive verbs which only make sense concerning a person or group of people that clings to or craves something. It is important that in the Buddha's system of thought these concepts are kept in their verbal form. Conversely, what happens in western thought is that verbal concepts tend to get nominalized and, in doing so, they get decontextualized and abstracted from the context in which they actually occur. For example, 'X perceives Y' becomes 'Perception' which is the nominalized form in which the person that perceives as well as the perceived object are absent, grammatically erased. The same happens with 'X knows Y' being nominalized as 'Knowledge' that is decontextualized and abstracted from the experiential context in which it actually occurs. With a decontextualized concept like knowledge one can speak of things like 'objective knowledge' and this is not the case with its verbal form knowing, which always implicitly includes the one that is knowing something.

Figure 1 will make this issue clearer.

At the left side (a) we can see a representation of the western system of thought in which the first person embodied perspective is effectively erased through believing that truth is an objective correspondence between symbols and reality (in this case, at the left the word 'tree' in hindi and at the right a representation of a 'real' tree). The belief that truth is independent from human experience rules out the possibility that the structure of language might be embodied, because truth is assumed to be an external matter that does not relate to the particularities of our minds and our embodiment.

This is precisely why it took more than two millennia for researchers as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to realize and uncover that the structure of language and our conceptual systems is largely embodied and largely metaphorical. The massive evidence for conceptual metaphor actually turns philosophy upside down because the structure of concepts like 'causation', 'time', 'mind', 'morality' is largely reliant on conceptual metaphors. Philosophers, out of ignorance, fail to recognize these as metaphors and treat them as if they were literal. These authors resume their results claiming that "the metaphoric character of philosophy is not unique to philosophic thought. It is true of all abstract human thought [...]. Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible [and] it is one of the greatest of our intellectual gifts."

At the right side (b) of the figure we find a representation of the buddhist' system of thought, in which what is central is the attitude or relationship that one establishes with objects of experience, that have the character of being transient and impermanent. The Buddha identifies the attitude in which we cling and do not let go of things that are transient and impermanent as one of the main causes of our suffering, and describes the task of removing our grip upon these things as the beginning of the possibility for willful action and what he refers to as the 'emancipation from life' or nirvana.

The paradox here is self-apparent, and I will denote it as the paradox of truth. We have on the one hand a culture that is committed to know what is 'real', to achieve or reach 'truth' and 'knowledge' and when it does so it is compelled to establish multiple false beliefs such as the belief in an independent reality, in a disembodied universal reason and the separate and unitary essence of things. In doing so, it is lead to imagine hierarchical separations that are constitutive of western culture: culture over nature, reason over emotion, man over woman, object/subject, objective over subjective, mental over physical, mind over body, will over instinct (Escobar 2013, Cáceres 2019).

The other side of the paradox is that the Buddha, who apparently is not concerned with 'knowledge' and 'reality', ends up having a philosophical system that is more accurate and adapted to the processual, transient, impermanent and evolving character of the evolution of the universe and the process of human life from birth to death. The explanatory power of the buddhist system of thought is also greater due to the use of the general concepts like 'craving' and 'clinging' that refer to regular attitudes that can happen concerning most aspects of our lives, at the same time as it provides an alternative attitude, which is the perspective of nirvana, where one does not cling or identify with these contents of experience.

It is evident that the western concern for 'truth' and 'reality' has lead science to uncover things like quantum, atomic, molecular, cellular, neural and cosmic structure, and in these domains it has lead to great explanatory power. However, in the eyes of the Buddha, knowing about these different dimensions of 'reality' has very limited application for knowledge in how should one live one's life.

What is really interesting in Stephen Batchelor's account on the evolution of Buddhist thought and practice is that at some point Buddhism starts getting 'colonized' by the theoretical concern with 'truth'. We see then that at some point the 'four tasks' are replaced with the 'Four Noble Truths', and in this doing, Buddhism stops being about tasks that one has to exercise persistently in time and turns into a religion in which the task of practitioners is to blindly accept the statements they get from its dogma. In short, it is the transition from a philosophy of active practice and effort towards a religion of static belief and obedience that is based on commitment to tradition and authority.

Maturana (1988) extensively wrote about the relationship between an assumed privileged access to 'truth' or 'reality' and the authority to demand obedience from others. In very simple terms, if one is capable of providing an objective rational argument, then one can demand another person to obey his demands, because objective arguments are undeniable and rely on a reference to what is 'real', and if one does not obey the precepts of rational arguments then one is labeled as irrational, unreasonable, illogical, arbitrary or absurd. This would be the basis for authoritative cultural patterns in which it is assumed that one group of people know something (the State, the Church, Science, etc.) and that the rest of the people are basically ignorants who must follow the rules provided by authority. However, this is a whole topic on itself and I will unfortunately refrain from saying more about it.

___________________________________________________________________________

Consider supporting us so we keep bringing you more high quality and deeply insightful content.

References

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54(7), 462.

Batchelor, S. (2015). After Buddhism: Rethinking the dharma for a secular age. Yale University Press.

Bordo, S. (2004). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. Univ of California Press.

Cáceres, R. (2019). Cultiver une amitié avec la nature: ontologie, relation au monde et éducation à la permaculture.

Escobar, A. (2013). En el trasfondo de nuestra cultura: la tradición racionalista y el problema del dualismo ontológico. Tabula Rasa, (18), 15-42.

Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Univ of California Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought (Vol. 28). New York: Basic books.

Lakoff, G. (2010). Why it matters how we frame the environment. Environmental Communication, 4(1), 70-81.

Maturana, H. R. (1988). Reality: The search for objectivity or the quest for a compelling argument. The Irish journal of psychology, 9(1), 25-82.

Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.

Varela, F. J., Rosch, E., & Thompson, E. (1993). The embodied mind.