Gilbert Ryle 1900 – 1976

Gilbert Ryle was a British analytic philosopher and one of the architects of post-war Oxford ordinary-language philosophy. As Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and editor of Mind, he shaped a generation of British thought. His Concept of Mind argued that the Cartesian dualism of mind and body rests on a category mistake and that mental concepts are best analyzed in terms of dispositions to behave and the abilities exercised in skillful action. He coined the influential distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that.

Gilbert Ryle was born in 1900 at Brighton, the son of a Brighton physician with a sideline in philosophy and astronomy. He read Greats and modern Greats at Queen's College, Oxford, and was elected a tutor at Christ Church in 1924. After service in the Welsh Guards intelligence during the Second World War, he succeeded R. G. Collingwood as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford in 1945 and held the chair until his retirement in 1968.

His major works are Philosophical Arguments (1945), The Concept of Mind (1949), Dilemmas (1954), Plato's Progress (1966), and the volumes of Collected Papers. From 1948 to 1971 he edited the philosophical journal Mind, in which capacity he encouraged the post-war flourishing of analytic philosophy and shaped the careers of two generations of philosophers.

The Concept of Mind launched a sustained attack on what Ryle famously called Descartes's myth of 'the ghost in the machine'; he argued that mental concepts are best understood as dispositions to behave and that philosophical errors typically arise from category mistakes. His ordinary-language and dispositional approach exerted a deep, if largely tacit, influence on the behaviorist and functionalist philosophy of mind that followed. He died at Whitby in October 1976.