George Lakoff is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and the coauthor, with Mark Johnson, of Metaphors We Live By. He was one of the founders of the generative semantics movements in linguistics in the 1960s, a founder of the field of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, and one of the developers of the neural theory of language in the 1980s and '90s. His other books include More Than Cool Reason (with Mark Turner), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and Moral Politics.

Mark Johnson is professor and head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon and is on the executive committee of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences there. In addition to his books with George Lakoff, he is the editor of an anthology, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor.