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The Concept of Mind
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This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory," the Cartesians "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language. His plain language and esstentially simple
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Paperback, 348 pages
Published
December 15th 2000
by University of Chicago Press
(first published January 1st 1949)
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OH, LET US NOT SPEAK FALSELY NOW -
THE HOUR IS GETTING LATE!
Bob Dylan
I remember when I picked up my first copy of this landmark brain-bamboozler - I was travelling to Britain, and I saw it at the airport.
Can you imagine that nowadays? Really brainy books at a little airport bookstop? Brainy books that only exist to prove a nonsensical idea is true?
Cause I remember, too, when I was seventeen, and a girl I knew in high school told me she had dated one highly neurotic guy who asked everyone he knew ...more
THE HOUR IS GETTING LATE!
Bob Dylan
I remember when I picked up my first copy of this landmark brain-bamboozler - I was travelling to Britain, and I saw it at the airport.
Can you imagine that nowadays? Really brainy books at a little airport bookstop? Brainy books that only exist to prove a nonsensical idea is true?
Cause I remember, too, when I was seventeen, and a girl I knew in high school told me she had dated one highly neurotic guy who asked everyone he knew ...more

Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men—a tautology which is sometimes worth remembering.
The problem of mind is one of those philosophical quandaries that give me a headache and prompt an onset of existential angst whenever I try to think about them. How does consciousness arise from matter? How can a network of nerves create a perspective? And how can this consciousness, in turn, influence the body it inhabits? When we look at a brain, or anywhere else in the phys ...more

This is a monumental book in modern philosophy which sets out to destroy the issue of dualism, expressed most succinctly by Descartes and often referred to as the mind/body problem. As a graduate student perusing this text, I was dismayed to read as Ryle apparently destroyed argument after argument which sustained Cartesian thinking.
Though this left me profoundly impressed at the time, I did not realize until much later that destroying a series of arguments concerning a given thing is not the s ...more
Though this left me profoundly impressed at the time, I did not realize until much later that destroying a series of arguments concerning a given thing is not the s ...more

My father's father's name is Gilbert Royal, Sr.
A riel is a monetary unit in one of those Asian countries, I forget which.
Sometimes I get riled up in a solipsistic muddle. It can become rather uncomfortable.
The copy of this book I was given early one morning was from a shared bookshelf in a shared rental residence that included at least one cat, at some point in time.
I am severely allergic to cats. I have been told by various health professionals that that allergy is in fact due to a specific pr ...more
A riel is a monetary unit in one of those Asian countries, I forget which.
Sometimes I get riled up in a solipsistic muddle. It can become rather uncomfortable.
The copy of this book I was given early one morning was from a shared bookshelf in a shared rental residence that included at least one cat, at some point in time.
I am severely allergic to cats. I have been told by various health professionals that that allergy is in fact due to a specific pr ...more

Concept of Mind
The common conception of how minds work is engrained in every facet of western society and culture. For centuries philosophers have been operating on various assumptions that without putting them to the test. This belief is that all humans, except possibly infants and idiots, have both a body and a mind. Human bodies are in space where human minds work outside of space. Being outside of space minds are not observable and therefore the possessors of these minds have privileged acc ...more
The common conception of how minds work is engrained in every facet of western society and culture. For centuries philosophers have been operating on various assumptions that without putting them to the test. This belief is that all humans, except possibly infants and idiots, have both a body and a mind. Human bodies are in space where human minds work outside of space. Being outside of space minds are not observable and therefore the possessors of these minds have privileged acc ...more

Ryle is indispensable reading for folks in the philosophy of mind or 20th century philosophy. Part of the reason that I wanted to revisit The Concept of Mind was to see how it stood up historically, and whether it was important to read Ryle or whether one might be better off reading him through those on whom he had a large influence. I think my most significant finding in this discussion is that it is really important for philosophers of mind to read Ryle and come away with their own interpretat
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This is the give away.
"Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language".
In other words this is not about the mind but rather the way in which we use language to talk about the mind. ...more
"Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language".
In other words this is not about the mind but rather the way in which we use language to talk about the mind. ...more

lotsa fun. presents the well known "ghost in the machine" thesis, and develops the fallacy "category mistake." presents a persuasive deductive critique of the concept of "volition." eat that, objectivists!
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I read this for graduate school in Applied Behavior Analysis. It remains one of the best attacks on Cartesian dualism and had a large impact on cognitive psychology. The concept of "the mind" is like the soul. It can't be measured, proven, or disproven. We can observe and measure actions, but we can't necessarily infer the internal reasoning behind these actions. We can observe that someone smokes and measure their smoking habit, but it's not pragmatic to theorize that the person smokes due to a
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Descartes helped establish the idea of the mind as a separate entity from the body, separate, perhaps, to the point of having altogether different origins. His theory bridged a gap opening up in his day between a newly natural conception of the universe and the traditional supernatural one. Cartesian dualism, in other words, made the intellectual arena safe for both scientists and theologians. Three centuries later comes this book, whose author, Gilbert Ryle, has decided to put paid to the two-t
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First published in 1949, Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is one of the classics of twentieth-century philosophy. Described by Ryle as a ‘sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work’ on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind is a radical and controversial attempt to jettison once and for all what Ryle called ‘the ghost in the machine’: Descartes’ argument that mind and body are two separate entities.

This book felt very much like a lite version of Heidegger's corpus. Do yourself a favour and skip directly to "Being and Time", the heavy handholding and excessively drawn out explanations of simple arguments make this book a frustrating and dull read.
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I happen to think Ryle misses the shot on what mind 'is' but he certainly does a brilliant job on sweeping away many of the previous misconceptions. If you care about the current debate on ToM you need to read this to get your thinking straight on what it is not.
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Reasoning that comes off as cloying and pedantic, frequent seeming misrepresentations of the position Ryle argues against (although it's very hard to tell, since he doesn't give explicit references to books he thinks get things wrong), terminological distinctions which don't match up with my everyday understandings of words (which explicitly clashes with Ryle's supposed plain English style), a literary style which comes off as someone who loves Wittgenstein but isn't nearly as clever... Doesn't
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Unbearably excruciating and revelatory! As if someone took my pre-frontal cortex out on a triathlon. I really didn't think there's a way to quantify "consciousness" in anything remotely scientific. Come on! I'd say. Yet I was proven very wrong (thank you books). Who studied this for their major? Did you survive? :)
...more

This book is like an old man with a very old bundle of cables meticulously unknotting everything while explaining the exact methods of his untangling as he does so.
It's interesting and peppered with logical deconstructions.
But in the end, when it's all untangled, it really is just a set of old cables.
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It's interesting and peppered with logical deconstructions.
But in the end, when it's all untangled, it really is just a set of old cables.
...more

While I disagree with his conclusions, the author has an engaging style. He argues against the idea of "a ghost in the machine," that is a spirit/mind in a body. He argues that we should not even talk about physical and mental as two different categories. This is a very influential book on the theory of mind.
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Gilbert Ryle's Concept of the Mind is a work that has an honored and earned spot in any history of philosophy. Yes, that does imply this is a "dated" work. It is an important work, nevertheless, for the author's investigation into how we ordinarily think of the mind, or, rather, our own mind in an everyday sense and how metaphysics creeps into our relationship with "it" through loose language. Written during a period when many philosophers thought it was of paramount importance to ascertain what
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I found this a long hard struggle to read through. Maybe because it's been nearly 30 years since I read any analytical philosophy, maybe because I found his arguments obscure, or maybe because I found the book repetitive. His attack on "the ghost in the machine" starts off well and he introduces his main technique of categorising concepts to illustrate how concepts of the wrong category can be misapplied. So far so good. He also introduces his infinite series argument (the ghost in the ghost in ...more

Jun 02, 2015
Matej
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
philosophy-of-mind,
philosophy
A valiant effort to analyse the ways in which qualities of the mind are invoed in both everyday and scientific discourse. The central thrust of the book is to give a deflationary account of the mental. Quite unlike the traditional Cartesian picture of the mental realm, where mental acts and mental entities dwell, Ryle presents qualities of the mind as modes of engaging with the world - as skills, modifications of behaviour, or processes.
This analysis points out serious difficulties with the trad ...more
This analysis points out serious difficulties with the trad ...more

Gilbert Ryle's classic philosophical work, The Concept of Mind, is now best remembered for the least philosophical part of it, the rhetorical dubbing of Descartes mind/body dualism as the "dogma of the ghost in the machine." Ryle's own particular brand of philosophical behaviorism hasn't weathered all that well, and so this book's surviving interest is primarily as a negative work. Nevertheless, the book is interesting as a crucible for Cartesians and those interested in the philosophical merits
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Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher, and a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist" (not to be confused
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“A person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.”
—
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“Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. . . . Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It 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. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd.”
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