ABSTRACT
Pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, determine most of our philosophical convictions. At any rate, they determine many of our most fundamental philosophical convictions. Philosophers alive to the power of pictures have tended to focus on metaphors deliberately employed and pictures actually endorsed by the philosophers guided by them, like the picture of the mind as a repository of images or as always the most sophisticated machinery of the day-a mechanical clock, a telephone exchange, a computer.1 In this book, by contrast, we shall develop and vindicate the idea that philosophical refl ection may be systematically guided, and misled, by metaphors and analogies that philosophers are not aware of relying upon. This idea will prove the key to a new understanding of the nature and genesis of many philosophical problems, which vindicates a radical reorientation of philosophical work.
