18+ Gilbert Ryle Quotes (Analytical, Mind-body And Dualism)

Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher who is best known for his book The Concept of Mind. He was a leading figure in the school of ordinary language philosophy, which sought to analyze philosophical problems using ordinary language. He was also influential in the development of the concept of dualism, which argues that the mind and body are two distinct entities.

The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. — Gilbert Ryle

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. — Gilbert Ryle

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. — Gilbert Ryle

The dogma of the Ghost in the machine. — Gilbert Ryle

Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines. — Gilbert Ryle

When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience."Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world. — Gilbert Ryle

Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers — Gilbert Ryle

It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts. — Gilbert Ryle

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record. — Gilbert Ryle

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word. — Gilbert Ryle

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet. — Gilbert Ryle

... my today's self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take. — Gilbert Ryle

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man. — Gilbert Ryle

In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted. — Gilbert Ryle

Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new. — Gilbert Ryle

To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. — Gilbert Ryle

To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind's eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark. — Gilbert Ryle

Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is in its own place and in each of us lies an inner life, the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear, and jolt one another's bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds — Gilbert Ryle

Life Lessons by Gilbert Ryle

1. Gilbert Ryle's work emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between mental and physical processes, demonstrating that they are not the same thing.
2. He argued that traditional philosophical accounts of the mind often conflate the two, leading to confusion and misunderstanding.
3. His work encourages us to be mindful of the distinction between the mental and physical aspects of our lives and to think critically about the way we use language to describe them.