Gilbert Ryle

Ryle's brothers John Alfred (1889–1950) and George Bodley (1902–1978), both educated at Brighton College, also had eminent careers.

John became Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge and physician to King George V. George, after serving as Director of Forestry first for Wales and then England, was Deputy-Director of the Forestry Commission and appointed a CBE.

Ryle was the subject of a portrait by Rex Whistler, which he said made him look like "a drowned German General".

He was a lifelong bachelor, and in retirement he lived with his twin sister Mary.

In The Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that dualism involves category mistakes and philosophical nonsense, two philosophical topics that continued to inform Ryle's work.

Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine."

He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems.

Some of Ryle's ideas in philosophy of mind have been called behaviourist.

Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, England, on 19 August 1900, and grew up in an environment of learning.

An example of the distinction can be knowing how to tie a reef knot and knowing that Queen Victoria died in 1901.

The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess.

Ryle thought it no longer possible to believe that a philosopher's task is to study mental as opposed to physical objects.

In its place, Ryle saw a tendency of philosophers to search for objects whose nature was neither physical nor mental.

Ryle believed, instead, that "philosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities."

Ryle analogizes philosophy to cartography.

Competent speakers of a language, Ryle believes, are to a philosopher what ordinary villagers are to a mapmaker: the ordinary villager has a competent grasp of his village, and is familiar with its inhabitants and geography.

But when asked to interpret a map of that knowledge, the villager will have difficulty until he is able to translate his practical knowledge into universal cartographic terms.

He was educated at Brighton College and in 1919 went up to The Queen's College at Oxford to study classics, but was soon drawn to philosophy.

He graduated with a "triple first"; he received first-class honours in classical Honour Moderations (1921), literae humaniores (1923), and philosophy, politics, and economics (1924).

In 1924, Ryle was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.

A year later, he became a fellow and tutor at Christ Church, where he remained until 1940.

In the Second World War, Ryle was commissioned in the Welsh Guards.

A capable linguist, he was recruited into intelligence work and by the end of the war had been promoted to the rank of Major.

After the war he returned to Oxford and was elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and editor of the philosophical journal Mind from 1947 to 1971.

In his best-known book, The Concept of Mind (1949), he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'."

Having studied the philosophers Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, Ryle suggested that the book instead "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label."

Gilbert Ryle's father, Reginald John Ryle, was a Brighton doctor, a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, passing on to his children a large library.

Gilbert's father was a son of John Charles Ryle, the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool.

The Ryles were Cheshire landed gentry; Gilbert's elder brother, John Alfred Ryle, of Barkhale, Sussex, became head of the family.

Their ancestor John Ryle, a silk merchant, was a friend of theologian and evangelist John Wesley; members of this Ryle family include the silk manufacturer ("father of the United States silk industry") John Ryle, as well as his nephew and business partner, William.

Gilbert Ryle's mother, Catherine, was daughter of Samuel King Scott (younger brother of the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott) by his wife Georgina, daughter of William Hulme Bodley, M.D., and sister of architect George Frederick Bodley, himself a student of Sir George.

Cousins of the Ryle family thus include the haematologist Ronald Bodley Scott, architect George Gilbert Scott Jr., founder of Watts & Co., and his son, Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the Battersea Power Station.

He published The Concept of Mind in 1949.

He rhetorically asked students in his 1967–68 Oxford audience what was wrong with saying that there are three things in a field: two cows and a pair of cows.

They were also invited to ponder whether the bunghole of a beer barrel is part of the barrel or not.

A distinction deployed in The Concept of Mind, between 'knowing-how' and 'knowing-that', has attracted independent interest.

This distinction is also the origin of procedural (knowing-how) and declarative (knowing-that) models of long-term memory.

This distinction is widely accepted in philosophy.

Ryle died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby, North Yorkshire.