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Thinkers

Gilbert Ryle

Analytic · Europe · 1900 to 1976

English philosopher who mocked the ghost in the machine, and said that mind means what people do and can do.

What it is

Gilbert Ryle (1900 to 1976) was a British philosopher, born in Brighton, who spent his working life at Oxford. He is best known for his attack on the picture of the mind as a ghostly thing inside the body, a view he mocked as the "ghost in the machine", which comes down from René Descartes. His book The Concept of Mind (1949) is widely thought to have dealt Cartesian dualism a heavy blow.

He studied at Queen's College, Oxford, and from 1924 taught at Christ Church. He wrote about the history of philosophy, about language and about thinking, and published a book on Plato, and he is counted among the philosophers of ordinary language.

The main ideas

  • The ghost in the machine. The dualist picture says that a person is a body in space joined to a mind that is not in space. Ryle argued that this picture is not just wrong but built on a confusion.
  • Category mistakes. A category mistake treats something of one logical kind as if it belonged to another, so that a theory built on it ends up absurd. He thought much of the dualist view of mind was a mistake of this kind.
  • Logical geography. Our everyday use of words gives us a working map of how expressions behave, and philosophers go wrong when they ignore it.
  • Looking at concepts. In The Concept of Mind he did not offer a new theory of what the mind is. He examined concepts such as knowing, imagining, pretending, hoping and wanting, to straighten out how we already use them.
  • Knowing how and knowing that. He separated knowing how to do something from knowing that something is the case, a distinction that has been taken up widely.
  • Ordinary language, with care. He studied the use of everyday and technical words, though he did not simply recommend that philosophy stay with ordinary talk.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone who has watched every match of a team, met every player and seen the stadium, and then asks to be shown the "team spirit" as if it were one more player. Ryle would say they have mistaken the way the players act together for a further member of the team. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, written by us, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Concept of Mind (1949) is his best-known and most important work.
  • His book on Plato and his papers on thinking and on the history of philosophy show the range of his interests.

Questions and criticism

  • Called a behaviourist. He wrote that the book would undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be called behaviourist, and some of his ideas have been called logical behaviourism.
  • Is the label ordinary language apt? He is often called an ordinary language philosopher, but that is only partly right.
  • Does the mind vanish? If talk of the mind is a way of talking about what people do and can do, it is fair to ask what is left of inner experience.

Close neighbours

René Descartes is the thinker whose picture of the mind he set out to undo, and the pages on J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein show others who studied how language is used. The pages on Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger belong to the traditions he had studied and questioned.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein · He took up the view that mental words get their meaning from how people use them in life.

Reacted against

  • René Descartes · His best-known book attacks what he called the Cartesian myth of a mind separate from the body.

Other Analytic thinkers

Sources we used

  • Gilbert Ryle · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
  • Gilbert Ryle · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
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