Gilbert Ryle

1900-1976 · British · Philosophy of Mind, Ordinary Language Philosophy, Philosophical Method, History of Philosophy

In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.

When Gilbert Ryle published The Concept of Mind in 1949, he set out to demolish the Official Doctrine — the Cartesian picture of the mind as a ghost inhabiting a machine, a private inner theater cut off from the body. The central charge was a category mistake: like the visitor shown Oxford's colleges and playing fields who asks "but where is the University?", Descartes had misunderstood what kind of thing the mind is. The University is not a building alongside the others; it is the way the colleges are organized. Mental terms like "intelligent" or "vain" specify patterns of conduct and…

Topics Gilbert Ryle addresses

• the ghost in the machine
• the category mistake
• the official doctrine
• dispositional analysis of mind
• knowing how and knowing that
• the intellectualist legend
• the regress of motives
• logical geography
• mental conduct concepts
• self-knowledge
• privileged access
• the systematic elusiveness of 'I'
• the will
• volitions
• emotion
• sensation and observation
• imagination
• the intellect
• intelligence
• thinking
• ordinary language philosophy
• philosophical method as elucidation
• conceptual confusion
• thick description

Converse with Gilbert Ryle on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Gilbert Ryle's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.