Gilbert Ryle Biography

British analytic philosopher, born in Brighton, educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He was Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy (1945–68) at Oxford, and succeeded G. E. Moore as editor of Mind (1947–71). Like J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, 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. The mind, according to Ryle, is not to be defined as a series of inner events or as consciousness, to which each individual has privileged access, but rather as a disposition or liability to behave in certain ways. Ryle's desire to demystify human action makes him the philosophical counterpart of behavioural psychologists like J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, and an inheritor of the sceptical tradition in British philosophy. Although Ryle's arguments have always been contested, his sophisticated manner of presentation set the terms of reference for academic philosophy in most British universities throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His most notable works include Locke on the Human Understanding (1933), Dilemmas (1954), Collected Papers (1971), and On Thinking (1979).