Gilbert Ryle

British analytic philosopher (1900–1976), professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford (1945–68), editor of Mind. Author of The Concept of Mind (1949), the foundational text of mid-century philosophical behaviourism / dispositionalism, and shorter articles on Husserl and phenomenology. MP's principal interlocutor at the Royaumont 1960 colloquium on analytic philosophy ("La Philosophie analytique," ed. Jean Wahl, Minuit 1962), reprinted as Chapter 5 of *Texts and Dialogues*: "Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy."

Key Points

  • Royaumont 1960: Ryle gave a paper that included a sharp caricature of Husserl as a Platonist of essences who had "founded" phenomenology at the cost of ignoring the actual work of language and conceptual analysis. Father H. L. Van Breda's response (cf. h-l-van-breda) corrected the caricature: Husserl held a doctorate in mathematics, was in regular contact with Cantor, Hilbert, Planck, and others, and had pre-1900 awareness of the same problems Ryle's analysis later treated.
  • MP's response (Royaumont): A series of probing questions designed to show that Ryle's own analysis exceeds the limits Ryle ascribes to "analytic philosophy." MP asks about: the distinction between Wortbedeutung and Bedeutung (Husserl's Logical Investigations); the second-person grammar (Ryle considered only first-and-third person; MP elevates the second person to a philosophical category); the Richtigkeit / Wahrheit distinction (correctness vs truth); the legitimacy of the notion of the possible in relation to the actual; invention as a philosophical category. Cf. merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues pp. 89–95.
  • Ryle's reply: courteously dismissive ("I cannot use the term 'language' . . . because I believe that one has only too much a tendency, at Oxford as well as other places, to use the words 'language' and 'linguistic' in a sense so lax and vague"). On Russell and Wittgenstein: "I certainly hope not [to be in agreement with their program]! . . . to learn something from a philosopher is to learn to recognize those points on which one disagrees with him."
  • Significance for MP: The Royaumont colloquium was the only sustained exchange between MP and the Anglo-American analytic tradition. MP's questions reveal what he saw as analytic philosophy's structural blindspots: its restriction to "correctness" rather than "truth"; its reduction of philosophy to dispositional analysis; its inability to handle the second person, mute experience, and intentional invention.

Connections

  • was MP's principal interlocutor at the 1960 Royaumont colloquium on analytic philosophy
  • was corrected by h-l-van-breda at Royaumont on the matter of Husserl's mathematical and scientific background
  • contrasts with phenomenological method as MP defends it in Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy (1960)
  • appears as a translator-target in MP's 1936 review of Sartre's Imagination (where the spontaneity-of-consciousness thesis Ryle would later defend in different vocabulary is articulated)

Sources