Gilbert Ryle Quotes

• In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Self, Hunters, Hunted

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Dark, Mind

  Gilbert Ryle (2009). “The Concept of Mind: 60th Anniversary Edition”, p.223, Routledge

  15 Copy quote

• Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Men, Aggravation, Needs

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.340, Lulu Press, Inc

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• 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

  Dream, May, Pavement

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

  Gilbert Ryle

  Destiny, Soul, Solitude

  Gilbert Ryle (2009). “The Concept of Mind: 60th Anniversary Edition”, p.5, Routledge

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

  Gilbert Ryle

  Self, Trying, May

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• 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

  Science, Mind, Causes

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.15, Lulu Press, Inc

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Science, Fairy Stories, Facts

  Concept of Mind (1949) introduction

  23 Copy quote

• The dogma of the Ghost in the machine.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Machines, Ghost, Dogma

  The Concept of Mind ch. 1 (1949)

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• Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Philosophy, Discipline, Replacements

  'The Concept of Mind' (1949) introduction

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

  Gilbert Ryle

  Facts, Deny, Myth

  'The Concept of Mind' (1949) introduction

  7 Copy quote

• Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Records, Chronicles

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.169, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Believe, Mind, Doe

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.55, Lulu Press, Inc

  18 Copy quote

• Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Myth, Stills, Theoretical

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.17, Lulu Press, Inc

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• 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

  Animal, Men, Mammals

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.340, Lulu Press, Inc

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• 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

  Lying, Differences, People

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Silly, Ignorance, Stupidity

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.18, Lulu Press, Inc

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Plato, Thinking, Views

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures 1953”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

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• When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Home, Hands, Two

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.15, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Dream, Thinking, Thoughtful

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• 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

  Play, Light, Firsts

  9 Copy quote

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