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Portrait by Rex Whistler. Source: Wikipedia
Gilbert Ryle was born in 1900, the son of a doctor with interests in philosophy and astronomy. He studied in Oxford and became a lecturer in philosophy in 1925. He published his main work, The Concept of Mind, in 1949.
Ryle had many interests and is somewhat difficult to put into a neatly labelled drawer. One thing he did was oppose Cartesian dualism.
Cartesian dualism
What does this mean?
It has to do with how many fundamentally different kinds of things one assumes to be in the world. There are chairs, cars and apples, of course. But, in the end, these are all of the same kind: material things. They have a length, a height and a weight. One can drop them and break them.
But not all things are material. We have thoughts, for instance. Thoughts don’t seem to have a length or a weight. People don’t get any heavier if they are thoughtful, nor is not-thinking an effective way to lose weight. Rene Descartes (who is the man behind ‘Cartesian’ philosophy and also the starting point of all modern thought, 1596-1650) accordingly thought that there are two fundamentally different substances in the world: on the one hand, material things, like chairs and apples. And on the other, thoughts. Mental processes, he said, must be different from matter, because obviously thoughts don’t have a length, or a weight.
Monism, Dualism and the Philosophy of Mind
The human mind is unique and we know of no other comparable phenomenon in the universe. The philosophy of mind (monism, dualism, computationalism) attempts to explain what exactly the mind is.
This general idea is called ‘dualism’ in the philosophy of mind, because it divides the world into two (Latin: duo) fundamental kinds of things. It is also familiar to us from Christian religion, which assumes that a human being is composed of both a material part, a body, and an immaterial part, a soul. The soul is what ‘thinks,’ and it is thought to survive the death of the body and go to heaven or hell.
This kind of thought was common long before Descartes, and even before Christianity. Plato already distinguishes between a (higher, purer) world of ideas, and a (lower, dirtier, less perfect) world of things. For Plato, things are just the imperfect ‘copies’ of the ideas. This is also a dualist approach.
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