GILBERT RYLE
Life
◦ Born August 19, 1900 in Brighton, England.
◦ Died October 6, 1976 (aged 76) in Whitby, England.
◦ Parents: Catherine Scott and Reginald John Ryle
◦ Education: The Queen's College (1919–1924), Brighton College
◦ Siblings: John Ryle
The Concept of Mind
◦ It is a 1949 book by philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in which the author argues that "mind" is "a philosophical
illusion hailing chiefly from René Descartes and sustained by logical errors and 'category mistakes'
which have become habitual.”
◦ The work has been cited as having "put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism, "and has been
seen as a founding document in the philosophy of mind, which received professional recognition as a
distinct and important branch of philosophy only after 1950.
Ghost in the Machine
◦ Ryle’s project consists in a sustained and punishing bombardment of the Cartesian conception of man,
characteristically labelled “the dogma of the ghost in the machine“. Ryle is trying to find how far he
could push analytical behaviorism, the doctrine that psychological notions can be analyzed in terms of
actual or possible behavior.
Critique of Cartesian Dualism
◦ Ryle rejects Descartes' theory of the relation between mind and body, on the grounds that it approaches
the investigation of mental processes as if they could be isolated from physical processes. In order to
demonstrate how this theory may be misleading, he explains that knowing how to perform an act
skillfully may not only be a matter of being able to reason practically but may also be a matter of being
able to put practical reasoning into action. Practical actions may not necessarily be produced by highly
theoretical reasoning or by complex sequences of intellectual operations. The meaning of actions may
not be explained by making inferences about hidden mental processes, but it may be explained by
examining the rules that govern those actions.
◦ According to Ryle, mental processes are merely intelligent acts. There are no mental processes that are
distinct from intelligent acts. The operations of the mind are not merely represented by intelligent acts,
they are the same as those intelligent acts. Thus, acts of learning, remembering, imagining, knowing, or
willing are not merely clues to hidden mental processes or to complex sequences of intellectual
operations, they are the way in which those mental processes or intellectual operations are defined.
Logical propositions are not merely clues to modes of reasoning, they are those modes of reasoning.
Category Mistakes
◦ As a linguistic philosopher, a significant portion of Ryle's argument is devoted to analyzing what he
perceives as philosophical errors based in conceptual use of language. His critique of Cartesian dualism
refers to it as a category mistake.[5] Category mistakes, such as the ones Ryle points out, are made by
people who do not know how to properly wield the concepts with which they are working. Their puzzles
arise from the inability to use certain items in human language. A much-cited example is of a foreign
visitor being shown round Oxford (which has no campus) and after having been shown colleges,
libraries, laboratories and playing fields asks in puzzlement "But where is the university?" The answer is,
of course, all of these.
Antecedents
◦ Ryle builds on the work of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arthur Schopenhauer, among others.
According to Bryan Magee, the central thesis of Concept of Mind and the essentials of its subsidiary
theses were derived from Schopenhauer, whose works Ryle had read as a student, then largely forgotten.
Ryle, who believed that he had expounded an original theory, did not realize what he had done until
someone pointed it out to him after the book was published.
Gilbert Ryle on Self
◦ “The Self is the way people behave”. The self is basically our behavior. This concept provided the
philosophical principle, “I act therefore I am”. In short, the self is the same as bodily behavior.
