Online research in philosophy

The Concept of Mind is the best known and the most important work of Gilbert Ryle. Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Carteisan dualism. Ryle rejects Descartes’ dualistic theory of the relation between mind and body. This doctrine of separation between mind and body is referred by Ryle as “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” Second, he himself anticipated and suggested dualism’s replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (sometimes analytical) behaviourism. This is an attempt of this paper is to draw outlines of his criticism of Dualism his dispositional theory of mind and how it is relevant in today’s philosophy of mind.

Gilbert Ryle's book The Concept of Mind was published in 1949. According to Ryle, his "destructive purpose" was to show that "a family of radical category mistakes" is the source of the "official doctrine," that is, a "double-life theory," according to which "with the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind." By numerous examples, Ryle showed quite forcefully how psychology and philosophy at the time were misled into asking the wrong kinds of questions. More than 50 years have elapsed since the original publication of Gilbert Ryle's book and, as Ullin T. Place wrote shortly before passing away, Ryle's conceptual analysis is now due, if not overdue, for a comeback. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the persistent relevance of category mistakes to current problems in the analysis of behavior.

My research work title is “A Philosophical Study of the Concept of Mind (with special reference to Rene Descartes, David Hume and Gilbert Ryle).” In this study we have discussed three conceptions of mind presented by Rene Descartes, David Hume and Gilbert Ryle. All the three thinkers are related to different philosophical traditions known as Rationalism, Empiricism and Analytical Philosophy respectively. Each of these various approaches can be seen as at least partly successful, each provides answers to questions regarded as especially pressing, each apparently solved certain problems. Notoriously, however, each leaves unanswered and unsolved a host of distinct problems as well.

The aim of this paper is to critically examine the Ryle’s conception of “Descartes Myth”. Ryle has two objectives in his book The Concept of Mind: (i) to refute a current philosophical theory about mind. (ii) to substitute at least in blue print, a satisfactory alternative. This paper gives a descriptive analysis of what Ryle calls Descartes-Myth and arguments for it. Conclusion of this paper drawn as he does not succeed in dispelling the myth but only substitutes a peculiar logical monism for Descartes’ Myth.

The notion that there is a category mistake or some other conceptual confusion in regarding seeing, hearing, and other forms of perception as events, states, or processes is incorrect. Ryle's analysis of "seeing" as an achievement word does not rule out our regarding seeing as an event, but in fact suggests that we do so when we carry the analysis beyond the point where Ryle leaves it. Furthermore there are uses of "see" not noticed by Ryle which justify our saying that within certain contexts seeing is a state and within other contexts a process. The question of what these events, states, and processes are cannot be met without recognizing a fundamental duality of aspect that characterizes perception. This duality can be formulated in terms of the way perception is known. One who observes a perceiver knows the perceiver's perception in a categorically different way than the perceiver knows it. From this it can be seen that perceptual events, states, and processes have both a physical aspect and an epistemological aspect. Any attempt to reduce one of these aspects to the other would involve a category mistake.