Saturn and Philosophy

It was the summer of 1998 and you were not working. The English translation of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn had just been published. You read about it in a book review and buy the book.

You read the first sentence.

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

You read all his works published in English after that.

You remember the cold winter day you read the news of his untimely death in a car accident. You recall the bright summer day you read that first sentence.

You remember early 1999 when you read the first sentences of Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson.

The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These are three major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of
these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.

You think about metaphors as you wander about the world.