Background

Gilbert Ryle was born on August 19, 1900, in Brighton, Sussex, England. One of ten children, he came from a prosperous family and enjoyed a liberal and stimulating childhood and adolescence. His father, Reginald John Ryle, was a general practitioner but had keen interests in philosophy and astronomy that he passed on to his children and an impressive library where Ryle enjoyed being an "omnivorous reader."

Education

Gilbert Ryle 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.

Career

As a result of his brilliant academic work, Ryle was appointed a 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 George Edward 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.

Ryle died on October 6, 1976, at Whitby in Yorkshire after a day's walking on the moors.

Achievements

• Gilbert Ryle was Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy (1945-1968) at Oxford, and succeeded George Edward Moore as editor of Mind (1947-1971). Ryle was interested in scrutinizing the workings of language, and in demonstrating how everyday linguistic idioms could create inappropriate beliefs and theories. His first major book, The Concept of Mind (1949), was an influential and elegant attack on Cartesian dualism, the notion that every human being has both a body and a mind. His most notable works include Locke on the Human Understanding (1933), Dilemmas (1954), Collected Papers (1971), and On Thinking (1979).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Concept of Mind

    (The Concept of Mind is a 1949 book by the philosopher Gil...)

    1949
  • Plato's Progress

    (This is, as from the author of The Concept of Mind it cou...)

    1966
  • Critical Essays

    (Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and controvers...)

    2009
  • Der Begriff des Geistes 1949

• Other Work

  • Collected Essays 1929-1968 2009

Religion

There is no information about Ryle's religious beliefs.

Politics

Gilbert Ryle wasn't involved in politics.

Views

In his principal and best-known work, The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle took a meat-axe against the body-mind dualism which permeates Western philosophy. As William Lyons put it: "In The Concept of Mind Ryle's Occamizing zeal and the logical tools he was developing to pursue this zealotry were at their highest pitch." Ryle claimed 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 suggested, 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 behavior.

He attacked the idea of the seventeenth century and eighteenth-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.

Novelists, historians, and journalists, Ryle pointed 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. Ryle held that such cognitivist theories cannot be scientific. He wrote: "According to the legend, whenever an agent does anything intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem... Must we then say that for the hero's reflections how to act to be intelligent he must first reflect how best to reflect how to act? The endlessness of this implied regress shows that the application of the appropriateness does not entail the occurrence of a process of considering this criterion."

Quotations: "A person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts."

"The vain man does not think he is vain."

"The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same."

"But when a person has done the right thing, we cannot then say that he knew how to do the wrong thing, or that he was competent to make mistakes."

"For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how."

Interests

• Reading

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Sport & Clubs

  Boating

Connections

There is no information about Gilbert Ryle's personal life.

Father:

Reginald John Ryle

Mother:

Catherine Ryle

colleague:

George Moore

References

• Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to His Philosophy by William Lyons
  1980