“Sheer thought” is pure reason. Kant wrote such a book as a precursor to the Scientific Method, where mere thought without testing and experimentation is just, at best, an educated view, and as such, one example may not and most likely will not be the truth or even the subtlety of the truth for all examples. This references the fallacy of too few examples to prove a whole.

Reason, thinking that it

Knows itself is only

Borrowed and

Assumes habitually

This appearance of

Necessity…

Our senses

That form in space.

The thing by itself is not known,

Nor can be known by representation,

Nor do we care…

Pretensions of reason are

Wrong causing dynamic

Antinomy…

Dialectical arguments of pure

Reason address the problem of

Freedom, where the problem is

Not psychological but

Transcendental.

Man’s propensity to isolate

Means he arranges

According to his own ideas.

The former are stanzas in a poem I wrote after reading The Modern Library’s version of the summation of Kant’s works called The Basic Writings of Kant as translated by F. Max Muller, Carl J. Friedrich, et. al.

The poem is a 46-page poem that I would love to publish but I need to see an attorney to see if I am violating copyright.

As for Lakoff’s book, a Philosophy PhD candidate friend said that Philosophy in the Flesh is perhaps the most important work of philosophy in the last 50 years, which argues that we cannot overcome our inherent perspective as human beings to see the world as our senses limit us. You cannot see, for example, that the sky is not necessarily blue, where “Blue is [simply] scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time,” (NASA Space place, https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/blue-sky/en/).