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1 Early influences
Gilbert Ryle was born in 1900 in Brighton, England, and went to the Queens College, Oxford, as a Scholar in
Classics. He read Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) and then Modern Greats (Philosophy, Politics and
Economics). In 1924 he became a Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford, and was to remain at Oxford
University for the whole of his academic life.
In a deliberate attempt to avoid sinking into what he felt was a rather parochial philosophical atmosphere at
Oxford, in the first few decades of the twentieth century Ryle deliberately directed his academic gaze outwards.
He travelled to Cambridge to hear Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, and set himself the task of reading
Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as well as dipping into Russells Principia Mathematica. Ryle also
set out to gain some knowledge of contemporary continental European philosophy. He taught himself German and
read Husserls Logische Untersuchungen, as well as some Croce, Gentile, Meinong, Brentano, Bolzano and Frege.
Against the prevailing fashion he offered at Oxford an unwanted course of lectures, entitled "Logical Objectivism:
Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl and Meinong", which became known as Ryles three Austrian railway stations and
one Chinese game of chance. Indeed Ryles first published pieces of philosophical writing were book reviews of
works by the Polish philosopher Ingarden (a follower of Husserl) and Heidegger.
As with the Cambridge school, so with the Continentals, Ryle was principally interested in their philosophical
logic, and this is reflected in the titles of his earliest papers, Negation (1929), Are There Propositions? (1930)
and following shortly after, Imaginary Objects (1933a), About (1933b) and Internal Relations (1935).
In the introduction to his Collected Papers, Ryle remarks that to elucidate the thoughts of a philosopher we need
to find the answer not only to the question "What were his intellectual worries?" but, before that question and after
that question, the answer to the question "What was his overriding worry?" (1971: ix). Ryle himself declared that
his overriding worry concerned the nature and function of philosophy itself. This question has arisen from time to
time in philosophy but, through the influence both of the scientistic doctrines of logical positivism and
Wittgensteins Tractatus, and also because of the remarkable inroads which natural science seemed to be making
into the subject matter of philosophy, the question became particularly insistent in the 1920s.
Ryle gave his answer in the seminal paper, Systematically Misleading Expressions (1932). His uncompromising
and restricted view of philosophy, as the exercise of systematic restatement, became one of the major influences
on the style and content of mid-century English-speaking philosophy. It led to those who felt sympathetic to
Ryles (and to some extent Wittgensteins) view of philosophy being dubbed Ordinary Language Philosophers
and to their movement, if it could be called that, being called Linguistic Analysis (seeOrdinary language
philosophy, school of 2-3).
When Ryle came to the task of working out his programme of systematic restatement in more detail, it turned out
to consist mainly of two subsidiary tasks, a positive and a negative one. The negative task was concerned with
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exposing and correcting conceptual mistakes perpetrated by philosophers mishandling of ordinary language in the
course of propounding and defending philosophical theories. The positive task consisted in what he later described
as conceptual cartography or the job of getting clear about the basic categories that were or should be operative
in some area of knowledge.
These views were among the influences that shaped the style of English-speaking philosophy in the twentieth
century. He believed that the growing passion for ratiocinative rigour was to be satisfied by ever more careful,
step-by-step conceptual analysis. Great emphasis was to be placed on getting clear about the exact meaning of
terms and, in consequence, on the exact usage of them. Ryles views about the nature of philosophy also
influenced the subject matter of philosophy, because he felt, with Wittgenstein, that philosophers should eschew
theorizing and be content with the logico-linguistic analysis of concepts. In turn, this meant that for several
decades philosophy in much of the English-speaking world became heavily weighted towards the analysis of
language.
For most of the Second World War Ryle was engaged in intelligence work. In 1945, he was elected to the
Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, which had lain vacant since R.G. Collingwoods death in
1943. In his Inaugural Lecture, entitled Philosophical Arguments, Ryle expanded on his views about the nature
of philosophy. Philosophical reasoning, he proclaimed, separates the genuine from the erroneously assumed
logical powers of abstract ideas by using the reductio ad absurdum argument as its flail and winnowing fan, and
philosophers of genius are those who have the insight to see, then flail and winnow, new abstract ideas which then
become the core of some new area of enquiry or some new way of making sense of an old area of enquiry.
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can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same (1949: 155)
It was conclusions such as these which led many to describe Ryle as a logical behaviourist. In The Concept of
Mind at least, he seemed to arrive at much the same conclusions as did the psychological behaviourists, but his
reasons were logico-linguistic, not methodological. On the other hand, it is probably true to say that both those
who assent that Ryle was a logical behaviourist and those who deny it find support for their arguments in The
Concept of Mind (see Behaviourism, analytic).
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List of works
Ryle, G. (1971) Collected Papers, London: Hutchinson, 2 vols.(These two volumes comprise all the papers,
except for a few very minor pieces, such as reviews and obituary notices, which Ryle published before 1971.
Of the papers mentioned in the body of this entry (with their original dates of publication in brackets, but given
here with the pagination of their most accessible form, in the Collected Papers) - namely Negation (1929:
1-11), Are There Propositions? (1930: 12-38), Systematically Misleading Expressions (1932: 39-62),
Imaginary Objects (1933a: 63-81), About (1933b: 82-4), Internal Relations (1935: 85-100), Platos
Parmenides (1939: 1-44), Review of F.M. Cornford: Plato and Parmenides (1939: 45-53), Philosophical
Arguments (1945: 194-211), "If", "So" and "Because" (1950a: 234-49), Heterologicality (1950b: 250-7),
Thinking and Language (1951: 258-71), and Ordinary Language (1953: 301-18) - all appear in volume 2,
with the exception of the two papers on the Parmenides, which are reprinted in volume 1.)
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.(In this, his magnum opus, Ryle sets out to dispel The
Cartesian Myth on account of which both philosophy and psychology since Descartes have been haunted by
the distinction between the inner and outer world. Ryle makes explicit the traces of Cartesianism in traditional
theories of will, feeling, imagination, perception and thought, and tries to obliterate those traces. In place of the
myth, he proposes an alternative behaviouristic account of our mental vocabulary.)
Ryle, G. (1954) Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures 1953, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Ryle sets out to
resolve certain false dilemmas wherein the ordinary persons account of the world or of their knowledge of it,
in terms of, for example, the concepts of pleasure or motion or perception, is made to look as if it is opposed to
and so inferior to some technical or scientific view of the world. These resolutions are a practical demonstration
of Ryles view that many philosophical problems are just cases of conceptual confusion which can be dissolved
by systematic restatement through the replacement of category habits by category disciplines.)
Ryle, G. (1966) Platos Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(A provocative intellectual history of
Plato, in which Ryle questions the accepted chronology of Platos dialogues and suggests that by and large they
were composed for public recitation at the great Hellenic festivals. He also disputes whether Aristotle was in
any meaningful sense ever a disciple of Plato.)
Ryle, G. (1979) On Thinking, ed. K. Kolenda, Oxford: Blackwell.(This collection of eight papers on topics of
thinking encompasses most of Ryles papers which were published after his Collected Papers went to press. It
also includes an interesting preface by Geoffrey Warnock as well as a very brief appendix, entitled On
Bouwsmas Wittgenstein.)
Ryle, G. (1993) Aspects of Mind - Gilbert Ryle, ed. R. Meyer, Oxford: Blackwell. (Includes some of Ryles
previously unpublished publishable papers, most of which were written between the late 1950s and the late
1960s. Among them is a paper on Platos Meno, a short piece tracing the development of Oxford Philosophy in
the mid-century, a set of notes of Ryles lectures and a seminar taken by Meyer, and two tributes to Ryle. In his
Annotations, Meyer mentions that when he retired as Waynflete Professor of Magdalen College in 1967,
Ryle donated his books and some papers to Linacre [College, Oxford]. The collection consists of about 1,100
books, some papers, rough notes and letters.)
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Lyons, W. (1980) Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to His Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester Press, and Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.(This is a critical introduction and guide, written for students, to the central
themes in Ryles philosophical work. It contains also a short biographical chapter plus a bibliography of works
which discuss topics in Ryles philosophy.)
Magee, B. (1971) Conversation with Gilbert Ryle, in Modern British Philosophy, London: Secker & Warburg.
(This transcript of a conversation with Ryle about his own philosophical work is part of a book that originated
in a series of conversations with contemporary British philosophers about their own or others work which
were first broadcast on BBC radio during the winter of 1970-1.)
Passmore, J. (1957) A Hundred Years of Philosophy, London: Duckworth, ch. 18.(This chapter, entitled
Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy, rightly places considerable emphasis on the work of Ryle
and in a very scholarly way places his work in context.)
Quinton, A.M. (1964) Contemporary British Philosophy, in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. D.J.
OConnor, New York: The Free Press.(This extended essay gives a synoptic account of the period leading up to
Ryle and of that in which Ryle flourished.)
Re, J. (1993) English Philosophy in the Fifties, Radical Philosophy 63.(This essay covers much the same
ground as Quinton (1964) but puts an interestingly different and more sceptical slant on things.)
Wood, O.P. and Pitcher, G. (eds) (1970) Ryle, Modern Studies in Philosophy series, ed. A. Rorty, London:
Macmillan.(This is a large collection of articles and reviews on Ryles work and remains the best secondary
source.)
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