Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Rylewas 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, in which he writes that the "general trend of this book...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth19 August 1900
Gilbert Ryle quotes about
deliberate dogma ghost official outline shall speak theory
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'.
philosophy discipline replacements
Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.
records chronicles
Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.
plato thinking views
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.
self trying may
... my today's self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.
dream thoughtful intelligent
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.
light play roles
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.
destiny solitude soul
Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.
lying differences people
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
facts deny myth
To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
myth stills theoretical
Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.
silly ignorance stupidity
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.
home hands two
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.
dream may pavement
Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers