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Gilbert Ryle Biography

Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher. He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine." Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist." Ryle's best known book is The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'." Ryle, having engaged in detailed study of the key works of Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, himself suggested instead that the book "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label."

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Gilbert Ryle Quotes

To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind's eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark.

Dark, Eye, Eyes, Illuminated, Mind, Visualise

To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Accordingly, Deny, Explode, Facts, Myth

When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds.

Category, Glove, Hands, Home, Purchaser, Two

When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience. "Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world.

Epistemologists, Light, Mental, Play, Roles, World

It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

Ignorance, Nose, Person, Same, Silly, Stupidity

Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

Clues, Description, Dream, Intelligent, Thinking, Thoughtful

Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

Good, Myth, Myths, Stills, Theoretical

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

Plato, Think, Thinking, Views, Word

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

Aggravation, Degraded, Machine, Man, Men, Needs

Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is in its own place and in each of us lies an inner life, the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear, and jolt one another's bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds

Differences, Ghostly, Inner, Lies, Lying, People

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Appropriate, Explode, Facts, Fairy Stories, Presentation, Science

. . . my today's self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.

Hold, May, Self, Slips, Take, Trying

Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.

Discipline, Philosophy, Replacement, Replacements