Gilbert Ryle

British Philosopher

Born: August 19, 1900 (Brighton, England)

Died: October 6, 1976 (Whitby, England)

Notable Works:
The Concept of Mind

Life
Ryle was born on 19 August 1900 in Brighton, England, one of ten
children in a prosperous family. His father was a doctor but also a generalist
who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, and passed on to his children
an impressive library, and the young Ryle grew up in an environment of
learning.
He was educated at Brighton College and, in 1919, he went to Queen's
College, Oxford, initially to study Classics, although he was soon drawn
to Philosophy. He graduated with first class honours in 1924 and was
appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. He
became a tutor a year later, and remained at Christ Church until World War
II (and remained at Oxford for his entire academic career until his retirement
in 1968).
A capable linguist, Ryle was recruited to intelligence work with
the Welsh Guards during World War II, and rose to the rank of Major by the
end of the War. He returned to Oxford in 1945 where he was
elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical
Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was generally
regarded as easy-going and sociable and an entertaining conversationalist,
but a fierce and forbidable debater, unforgiving of pomposity and
pretentiousness.
 He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and
editor of the philosophical journal "Mind" for nearly twenty-five years from
1947 to 1971. He published his principal work, "The Concept of Mind", in 1949.
A confirmed bachelor, he lived after his retirement in 1968 with his twin
sister, Mary, in the village of Islip, Oxfordshire. Gardening and walking gave
him immense pleasure, as did his pipe (without which he was rarely seen).
Ryle died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby in North Yorkshire, after a day's
walking on the moors.

Work
In his writing, Ryle had a literary and instantly recognizable style. He is
mainly known for his book, "The Concept of Mind" (1949), but he also wrote
a collection of shorter pieces called "Dilemmas" (1954), as well as "Plato's
Progress" (1966) and "On Thinking" (1979). "The Concept of Mind" in
particular was recognized on its appearance as an important contribution
to philosophical psychology and Philosophy of Mind, and an important work
in the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement.
In his "The Concept of Mind" of 1949, Ryle attacked the body-
mind Dualism (the claim that the Mind is an independent entity, inhabiting
and governing the body) which has largely permeated Western
Philosophy since Ren Descartes in the 17th Century, rejecting it as a
redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological
sciences became established. He dismissed the idea that nature is a complex
machine, and that human nature is a smaller machine with a "ghost" in it to
account for intelligence, spontaneityand other such human qualities (he
referred to Descartes' model as "the dogma of the ghost in the machine").
Ryle believed that the classical theories (whether
Cartesian, Idealist or Materialist) made a basic "category-mistake" by
attempting to analyze the relation between "mind" and "body" as if they were
terms of the same logical category. He argued that philosophers do not need
a "hidden" principle to explain the supra-mechanical capacities of humans,
because the workings of the mind are not distinct from the actions of the
body, but are one and the same. Looked at another way, he characterized
the mind as a set of capacities and abilitiesbelonging to the body.
He claimed that mental vocabulary is merely a different way of
describing action, and that a person's motives are defined by that
person's dispositions to act in certain situations. He concluded that adequate
descriptions of human behaviour need never refer to anything but
the operations of human bodies, which can be seen as a form of Philosophical
Behaviourism (also known as Analytical or LogicalBehaviourism) which
became a standard view among Ordinary Language philosophers for several
decades (although more recently it has morphed into a kind
of Functionalism).
Ryle also formulated a cartography analogy for his conception of
philosophy. He suggested that competent speakers of a language are to
a philosopher what simple villagers are to a mapmaker. The villager knows
his way around his village well enough for personal and practical purposes,
but may not be able to use a map to pinpoint or describe routes to an
outsider. In the same way, philosophers should be able to explain and make
apparent the meaning of sentences by "mapping" the words and phrases of
a particular statement, generating what Ryle called "implication threads",
such that each word or phrase of a statement contributes to the statement in
such a way that, if the words or phrases were changed, the statement would
have a different implication. Philosophy, then, should search for
the meaning of these implication threads in the statements in which they are
used.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_ryle.html

Hisarza, Mark Jake T.