There has been a phenomenal growth of interest in metaphor as a cognitive principle, active in the construction of knowledge and the world. However, despite the large volume of material published on cognitive metaphor, little has been done to assess how claims made within the field draw upon continental philosophy. What the continental tradition provides, Cazeaux claims, is a series of frameworks which allows metaphor's cognitive potential to be pursued to the limit.

Metaphor presents the theory of knowledge with a number of questions:

How can a subjective judgment be objective? How can the juxtaposition of subjects in a metaphor create new cognitive possibilities? How does metaphor map out the world for us? How might metaphor assist us at the point when key philosophical distinctions, such as subject-world and language-reality, are no longer tenable?

The book demonstrates how these questions are confronted by leading continental thinkers. Clear and incisive accounts are given of the importance metaphor has for Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Derrida. As Cazeaux shows, they respond to the questions by positioning metaphor in various ways as a tension, operating in between the fundamental distinctions of philosophy.