Gilbert Ryle

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Western Philosophers 20th-century philosophy
Image:Gilbert Ryle.jpg
Name	Gilbert Ryle
Birth	August 19, 1900
Death	October 6 1976 (aged 76)
School/tradition	Analytic
Main interests	Language, Ordinary language philosophy, Philosophy of mind, Behaviourism, Meaning, Cognition
Notable ideas	Ryle's Regress, Ordinary language philosophy, The Ghost in the machine
Influences	Descartes, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein
Influenced	J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, J.R. Searle, R.M. Hare, Wilfrid Sellars, Daniel Dennett

Gilbert Ryle (born August 19, 1900 in Brighton, died October 6, 1976 in Oxford), was a philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". He referred to some of his ideas as "behaviourism"^{[citation needed]} (not to be confused with the psychological behaviourism of B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson).

He was born in Brighton, England in 1900 and educated at Long Bennington and then Brighton College, like his brothers John and George (In later life, Gilbert was a governor of Brighton College and the school named a dayboy house in his honour). A capable linguist, he was recruited to intelligence work during World War II, after which he became Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, and published his principal work, "The Concept of Mind" in 1949. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946.

Contents 1 The Concept of Mind 2 Legacy and Criticism 3 Other writings 4 Notes and references 5 External links

[edit] The Concept of Mind

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle admits to having been taken in by the body-mind dualism which permeates Western philosophy, and claims 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 suggests, 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 behaviour.

He attacks the idea of 17th and 18th 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.

Ryle asserted that the workings of the mind are not distinct from the actions of the body. They are one and the same. Mental vocabulary is, he insists, merely a different manner of describing action. He also claimed that the nature of a person's motives are defined by that person's dispositions to act in certain situations. There are no overt feelings, pains, or twinges of vanity. There is instead a set of actions and feelings that are subsumed under a general behavior-trend or propensity to act, which we term "vanity."

Novelists, historians and journalists, Ryle points 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.

[edit] Legacy and Criticism

"The Concept of Mind" was recognized on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in the ordinary language philosophy movement. However, in the 1960s and 1970s the rising influence of the cognitivist theories of Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon, Jerry Fodor and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant. Chomsky even wrote a book entitled Cartesian Linguistics. In philosophy the two major post-war schools in the philosophy of mind, the representationalism of Jerry Fodor and the functionalism of Wilfrid Sellars posited precisely the 'internal' cognitive states that Ryle had argued against. However as influential modern philosopher and former student Daniel Dennett has pointed out, recent trends in psychology such as embodied cognition, discursive psychology, situated cognition and others in the post-cognitivist tradition have provoked a renewed interest in Ryle's work. Dennett has provided a sympathetic foreword to the 2000 edition of The Concept of Mind.^[1] Ryle remains a significant defender of the possibility of lucid and meaningful interpretation of higher-level human activities without recourse to an abstracted soul.

Aspects of Ryle's work have been an important influence on cultural anthropologists like Clifford Geertz who approvingly quote his notion of 'thick description.'

Allan Bloom, the classicist and Greek scholar whose 1968 translation of Plato's Republic became the canonically preferred text in the second half of the 20th century, wrote of Ryle:

In themselves Ryle's opinions are beneath consideration, but they do deserve diagnosis as a symptom of a sickness which is corrupting our understanding of old writers and depriving a generation of their liberating influence...Such scholarship should give us pause, for Ryle is held by many to be one of the preeminent professors of philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world.^[2]

Bloom's central criticism indicts Ryle for anachronistically "Aristotelianizing" Platonic texts, thereby putting them through an artificial "analytic strainer." According to Bloom, this mediation vitiates the content of Plato's text by "torturing Plato to conform to a dogmatic starting point," rather than entering at the natural beginning.

[edit] Other writings

His other books are Plato's Progress (1966), Dilemmas (1954), a collection of shorter pieces, and On Thinking (1979). He was also editor of the philosophical journal Mind from 1947 to 1971.

A text which has influenced anthropologists is 'The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?' [1]

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

• Gilbert Ryle at PhilosophyPages.com
• About Ryle's Concept of Mind
• The Philosophy of Gilbert Ryle
• Ordinary Language, the Philosophical Review LXII (1953)
• Daniel Dennett introduces The Concept of Mindde:Gilbert Ryle

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