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Gilbert Ryle

The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) ranked among the leaders of the contemporary analytic movement in British philosophy. His most original work was his analysis of the concept of mind.

Gilbert Ryle was born on Aug. 19, 1900, in Brighton, the son of a prosperous doctor. He was educated at Brighton College and then entered Queen's College, Oxford, where he took first honors in two subjects: classical honor moderations and the school of philosophy, politics, and economics. He was also captain of the Queen's College Boating Club.

As a result of his brilliant academic work, Ryle was appointed lecturer in 1924 and a year later tutor in philosophy, both appointments at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1940 he was commissioned in the Welsh Guards, serving for the duration of World War II and ending his military career as a major.

Ryle returned to Oxford to become Waynfleete professor of metaphysical philosophy, a post he held from 1945 to 1968. In 1947 he inherited from G. E. Moore the editorship of Mind, the most influential journal of English philosophy.

Early in his philosophical career, Ryle decided that the task of philosophy was "the detection of the sources in linguistic idioms of recurrent misconceptions and absurd theories." In his Tanner Lectures, published as Dilemmas (1954), he showed how certain philosophical impasses could be dissolved by a clearer understanding of the concepts employed by the apparently contradictory views.

In his major work, The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle mounted a devastating attack on Cartesian dualism and, in particular, on the view of mind as a separate substance apart from the body. He caricatured this view as the "myth of the ghost in the machine" proposed by Descartes. Ryle's own view of mental reality is that it consists in dispositions to behave in certain ways. He tried to show that mental concepts do not refer to private, unwitnessable events, maintaining against critics that his view was not identical with behaviorism.

In Plato's Progress (1966) Ryle exhibited an unexpected talent for ingenious speculation in an attempt to reconstruct the historical genesis of Plato's dialogues. Ryle, a bachelor, lived most of his life in college rooms. Friends said that "the Common Room atmosphere fits him like a glove." Quick and formidable in debate, Ryle was also the writer of clear and witty prose. He took particular delight in exploding pompous views and in inventing fresh metaphors and vivid aphorisms. Though professing to dislike erudition and intellectual matters, Ryle was both learned and highly intellectual. He was said to distrust imagination and its works, but he had a typically British love of gardening.

Further Reading

Ryle's works are eminently readable even for the general reader. The Concept of Mind (1949) and Dilemmas (1954) are the most important. The only study of any length is the highly critical one by Laird Addis in Moore and Ryle: Two Ontologies (1965). Also see William Lyons, Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to his Philosophy, (1980) and Ira Altman, The Concept of Intelligence: A philosophical Analysis (1997). Collections of Ryle's works include: Modern Studies in Philosophy (1971) and Logic and Language (1978).

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gilbert Ryle

(born Aug. 19, 1900, Brighton, Sussex, Eng. — died Oct. 6, 1976, Whitby, North Yorkshire) British philosopher, leading figure in the "ordinary language," or "Oxford" school of analytic philosophy. He became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church College in 1924. He was Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford from 1945 to 1968 and editor of Mind from 1948 to 1971. His major work, The Concept of Mind (1949), rejects Cartesian dualism as the logically incoherent doctrine of the "ghost in the machine" and argues for a "logical behaviourism" according to which attributions of mental states need refer only to the behaviour of bodies and not to any mysterious entity hidden inside them. His other works include Philosophical Arguments (1945), Dilemmas (1954), A Rational Animal (1962), Plato's Progress (1966), and The Thinking of Thoughts (1968).

For more information on Gilbert Ryle, visit Britannica.com.

Philosophy Dictionary: Gilbert Ryle

Ryle, Gilbert (1900-76) English philosopher and classicist. Ryle was born in Brighton, educated at Oxford, and after teaching from 1924 to 1945 at Christ Church, became professor at Oxford. His earliest interests were in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger. But from the 1930s onwards he absorbed the influence of the later work of Wittgenstein, becoming a fierce advocate of the kind of attention to language demanded by Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. His Concept of Mind (1949) is a sustained attack on the Cartesian philosophy of mind, or dogma of the ‘ghost in the machine’. The behaviourism it substitutes is a little too brisk, but Ryle did a great deal to lay the groundwork for late developments such as functionalism. The brio and verve of his work are unusual in analytical philosophy, and come out further in Dilemmas (1953), and Plato's Progress (1966).

Columbia Encyclopedia: Ryle, Gilbert,

1900–1976, British philosopher. A graduate of Oxford, he became a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, and later was Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy (1945–68) there. From 1947 to 1971 he was editor of the philosophical journal Mind. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ryle was concerned with problems caused by the confusion of grammatical with logical distinctions. He pointed out the so-called category mistake, in which, usually because of a grammatical equivalence, two things are mistakenly treated as belonging to equivalent logical categories. In his Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle argued that the mind is not a non-physical substance residing in the body, “a ghost in a machine,” but a set of capacities and abilities belonging to the body. All references to the mental must be understood, at least theoretically, in terms of witnessable activities. His other works include Dilemmas (1954), Plato's Progress (1966), and Collected Papers (2 vol., 1971).

Bibliography

See G. Pitcher and O. Wood, ed., Ryle (1971).

Wikipedia: Gilbert Ryle

Western Philosophers 20th-century philosophy

Name	Gilbert Ryle
Birth	August 19, 1900
Death	October 6 1976 (aged 76)
School/tradition	Analytic
Main interests	Language, Ordinary language philosophy, Philosophy of mind, Behaviourism, Meaning, Cognition
Notable ideas	Ryle's Regress, Ordinary language philosophy, The Ghost in the machine
Influences	Descartes, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein
Influenced	J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, J.R. Searle, R.M. Hare, Wilfrid Sellars, Daniel Dennett

Gilbert Ryle (born August 19, 1900 in Brighton, died October 6, 1976 in Oxford), was a philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". He referred to some of his ideas as "behaviourism" (not to be confused with the psychological behaviourism of B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson).

He was born in Brighton, England in 1900 and educated at Long Bennington and then Brighton College, like his brothers John and George (In later life, Gilbert was a governor of Brighton College and the school named a dayboy house in his honour). A capable linguist, he was recruited to intelligence work during World War II, after which he became Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, and published his principal work, "The Concept of Mind" in 1949. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946.

The Concept of Mind

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle admits to having been taken in by the body-mind dualism which permeates Western philosophy, and claims that the idea of Mind as an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body, should be rejected as a redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological sciences became established. The proper function of Mind-body language, he suggests, is to describe how higher organisms such as humans demonstrate resourcefulness, strategy, the ability to abstract and hypothesize and so on from the evidences of their behaviour.

He attacks the idea of 17th and 18th century thinkers (such as Descartes and La Mettrie) that nature is a complex machine, and that human nature is a smaller machine with a "ghost" in it to account for intelligence, spontaneity and other such human qualities. While mental vocabulary plays an important role in describing and explaining human behavior, neither are humans analogous to machines nor do philosophers need a "hidden" principle to explain their super-mechanical capacities.

Ryle asserted that the workings of the mind are not distinct from the actions of the body. They are one and the same. Mental vocabulary is, he insists, merely a different manner of describing action. He also claimed that the nature of a person's motives are defined by that person's dispositions to act in certain situations. There are no overt feelings, pains, or twinges of vanity. There is instead a set of actions and feelings that are subsumed under a general behavior-trend or propensity to act, which we term "vanity."

Novelists, historians and journalists, Ryle points out, have no trouble in ascribing motives, moral values and individuality to people's actions. It is only when philosophers try to attribute these qualities to a separate realm of mind or soul that the problem arises. Ryle also created the classic argument against cognitivist theories of explanation, Ryle's Regress.

Legacy and Criticism

"The Concept of Mind" was recognized on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in the ordinary language philosophy movement. However, in the 1960s and 1970s the rising influence of the cognitivist theories of Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon, Jerry Fodor and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant. Chomsky even wrote a book entitled Cartesian Linguistics. In philosophy the two major post-war schools in the philosophy of mind, the representationalism of Jerry Fodor and the functionalism of Wilfrid Sellars posited precisely the 'internal' cognitive states that Ryle had argued against. However as influential modern philosopher and former student Daniel Dennett has pointed out, recent trends in psychology such as embodied cognition, discursive psychology, situated cognition and others in the post-cognitivist tradition have provoked a renewed interest in Ryle's work. Ryle remains a significant defender of the possibility of lucid and meaningful interpretation of higher-level human activities without recourse to an abstracted soul.

Aspects of Ryle's work have been an important influence on cultural anthropologists like Clifford Geertz who approvingly quote his notion of 'thick description.'

Allan Bloom, the classicist and Greek scholar whose 1968 translation of Plato's Republic became the canonically preferred text in the second half of the 20th century, wrote of Ryle:

In themselves Ryle's opinions are beneath consideration, but they do deserve diagnosis as a symptom of a sickness which is corrupting our understanding of old writers and depriving a generation of their liberating influence...Such scholarship should give us pause, for Ryle is held by many to be one of the preeminent professors of philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world.^[1]

Bloom's central criticism indicts Ryle for anachronistically "Aristotelianizing" Platonic texts, thereby putting them through an artificial "analytic strainer." According to Bloom, this mediation vitiates the content of Plato's text by "torturing Plato to conform to a dogmatic starting point," rather than entering at the natural beginning.

Other writings

His other books are Plato's Progress (1966) and Dilemmas (1954), a collection of shorter pieces. He was also editor of the philosophical journal Mind from 1947 to 1971.

A text which has influenced anthropologists is 'The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?' [1]

Notes and references

^ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10998

External links

Gilbert Ryle at PhilosophyPages.com
About Ryle's Concept of Mind
The Philosophy of Gilbert Ryle
Ordinary Language, the Philosophical Review LXII (1953)

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