Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, England, on 19 August 1900, into a scholarly household. He attended Brighton College and entered The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1919 to study classics, but quickly shifted his focus to philosophy. He earned a triple first: first-class honours in classical Honour Moderations (1921), literae humaniores (1923), and philosophy, politics, and economics (1924). Ryle began his academic career in 1924 as a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford, becoming a fellow and tutor there the following year. He remained at Christ Church until 1940. During the Second World War, he served in the Welsh Guards and, thanks to his linguistic abilities, was recruited into intelligence, rising to the rank of Major. After the war, he returned to Oxford as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He published *The Concept of Mind* in 1949, served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and edited the journal *Mind* from 1947 to 1971. He died on 6 October 1976 in Whitby, North Yorkshire. In retirement, he lived with his twin sister Mary. Ryle is best known for his attack on Cartesian dualism, which he labelled the “ghost in the machine.” His ideas in the philosophy of mind are often described as logical behaviourist. In *The Concept of Mind*, he acknowledged that its “general trend will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as ‘behaviourist’.” However, having studied Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, he also suggested the book “could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label.”

Ryle helped pioneer ordinary language philosophy. Bryan Magee noted that Ryle’s 1931 paper “Systematically Misleading Expressions” contained the “first clear public statement of the view of philosophy that has come to be known as Linguistic Philosophy.” G.J. Warnock said *The Concept of Mind* was “one of the first, and hence has been one of the most widely influential, attacks in the new style upon an old family of problems.”

In *The Concept of Mind*, Ryle argued that dualism rests on category mistakes and philosophical nonsense. He illustrated this by asking his 1967–68 Oxford students what was wrong with saying there are three things in a field: two cows and a pair of cows. He also invited them to consider whether a beer barrel’s bunghole is part of the barrel. Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-that’ has gained independent interest. He argued that philosophers have focused on knowing that something is the case—discovering truths or facts—while ignoring knowing how to do things, or trying to reduce it to fact-discovery. They assume intelligence is just contemplating propositions. An example is knowing how to tie a reef knot versus knowing that Queen Victoria died in 1901. This distinction underlies procedural and declarative models of long-term memory and is widely accepted. Ryle compared philosophy to cartography. Competent language users, he believed, are like ordinary villagers who know their village well but struggle to interpret a map of it. The philosopher, like a mapmaker, translates practical knowledge into neutral, public terms. By mapping the words and phrases of a statement, philosophers generate “implication threads”: changing a word or phrase alters the statement’s implications. The philosopher’s task is to show these directions. Ryle thought it no longer possible to see philosophy as studying mental versus physical objects, nor as searching for entities that are neither. Instead, “philosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities.” His arguments in *The Concept of Mind* aimed not to increase what we know about minds but “to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess.”

Ryle’s brothers also had notable careers. John Alfred (1889–1950) became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge and physician to King George V. George Bodley (1902–1978) served as Director of Forestry for Wales and then England, became Deputy-Director of the Forestry Commission, and was appointed a CBE.