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According to Lakoff and Johnson, an embodied philosophy "would show the laws of thought to be metaphorical, not logical; truth would be a metaphorical construction, not an attribute of objective reality." That is, it would not rely on any foundation ontology from the physical sciences or from religion, but would likely proceed from metaphors known effective for certain situations, as in the philosophy of action.

The goals of this school of philosophy include a more localized political science, perhaps one tied to ecoregions rather than to global ideology, and a non-dualistic account of the body to complement the more dualistic accounts of philosophy of law and philosophy of medicine , which literally dispose of the body and parts of the body. These all have deep roots in traditional anti-Cartesian approaches, such as Immanuel Kant's "skeptical view, arguing that we can have no positive knowledge about the nature of the mind and rejecting Cartesian claims that we have a privileged self-knowledge." Kant was likewise concerned with medicine and law, and had long sought to find general principles of personal conduct, most famously his Categorical ImperativeThe philosophical concept of a categorical imperative is central to the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In his philosophy, it denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that allows no exceptions, and is both required and justified as an end in itse, the basis of his ethicsEthics is a general term for what is often described as the " science of morality". In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is " good". The Western tradition of ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy . This is one of the three major branches of.

Embodied philosophers as exemplified by Lakoff and Johnson have an even more ambitious goal: extensions to the embodied mind thesis based on findings in cognitive scienceCognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. Luger 1994). Practically every introduction to cognitive science also stresses that it is highly interdisciplinary; it is often said to consist of, take par, yielding a cognitive science of mathematicsThe cognitive science of mathematics is the study of mathematical ideas using the techniques of cognitive science. Specifically, it is the search for foundations of mathematics in human cognition. This approach was long preceded by the study, in cognitive to explain how " isomorphismIn mathematics, an isomorphism is a kind of interesting mapping between objects. Douglas Hofstadter provides an informal definition: :The word "isomorphism" applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part" is constructed from varying levels of metaphor, and why mathematicians accept this type of metaphor as "more real" than any other. This is distinct from the "social constructivism" view of mathematicsPhilosophy of mathematics is that branch of philosophy which attempts to answer questions such as: "why is mathematics useful in describing nature?", "in which sense, if any, do mathematical entities such as numbers exist?" and "why and how are mathematic.

However, some assumptions re: human cognitive biasCognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science, including very basic statistical and memory errors that are common to all human beings (first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) and drastically skew t and falsifiability of assertions regarding it seem to be shared by both schools. Likewise, some of embodied philosophy is clearly convergent with postmodernism, feminism, "queer" and other social construction paradigms that discuss socially-enforced metaphorical construction as a product not only of an "embodied" cognitive bias or an "isomorphic" notation bias but also of culture bias. In this broader sense, embodied philosophy has most of its influence on political science, on green economists and their search for an "embodied" or "body-respecting" political economy. It could also be said to be the main thrust of the anti-globalization movement, i.e. embodiment as localization, although that claim is disputed by those who view that movement as one narrowly opposing just capitalism.

The late biologist Francisco Varela, and his collaborator Humberto Maturana, have also been major proponents of this view. This view is compatible with some views of cognition promoted in neuropsychology, such as the theories of consciousness of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Gerald Edelman, and Antonio Damasio.

It could be argued that José Ortega y Gasset, George Santayana, Miguel de Unamuno, Martin Heidegger and others in the broadly existential tradition have proposed philosophies of mind very close to the 'embodiment' thesis.

In his pre-critical period, philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated a remarkably similar embodied view of the mind-body problem that was part of his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755).