I'm not a philosopher, but this sounds awfully like embodied mathematics: Mathematical ideas grow from embodied experience plus metaphor. Lakoff and Nuñez's "Wh

I'm not a philosopher, but this sounds awfully like embodied mathematics: Mathematical ideas grow from embodied experience plus metaphor. Lakoff and Nuñez's "Where Mathematics Comes From" is an extended effort at demonstrating that this can be done in a convincing way.