The Concept of Mind

That split has a famous nickname.

In 1949, an Oxford philosopher named Gilbert Ryle published a book called The Concept of Mind, and he mocked Descartes' picture as the ghost in the machine.

A ghost living inside a mechanical body, steering it from within.

Ryle thought the pictures was a mistake.

I also, uh, came to Margaret MacDonald through Gilbert Ryle, and m- my path, uh, was q- quite a bit different from Michael's.

So I had always had, since I was an undergraduate, this sense that Ryle knew about American pragmatism and that his famous 1949 book, The Concept of Mind, was really thick with, uh, pragmatist ideas.

And so finally, now many decades later, I started to write a book on, on how Oxford ordinary language philosophy, Ryle and Austin, were influenced by American pragmatism.

So I was, I was deep in the, in the weeds of this, and I came across a paper of Margaret MacDonald's, a 1937 paper titled Induction and Hypothesis, where she just lays out the three ideas that Ryle would then become famous for.

M- Margaret MacDonald, in this paper, lays out the three ideas that Ryle would later become famous for.

There are various connections to other women philosophers that show up in her story.

But initially, my interest in her was just as a philosopher whom I found, you know, saying very interesting things throughout her career.

So first of all, in the introduction of your book, you say that Macdonald sheds new light on the position of women in British philosophy prior to the Second World War, and that complicates a certain picture arising from the two recent books published on the Oxford quartet.

Oh, can you see that? Hang on.

Oh, it's The Concept of Mind anyway, by Gilbert Ryle, which is, uh, this is a Penguin Classic edition.

Um, it's a, um, sort of classic of, uh, 20th century British analytic philosophy.

But, uh, in this, these days and ages, this day and age where we have, uh, tech billionaires writing manifestos about, you know, cognizant AI rights, and how reinforcement learning is tantamount to torture, and these kind of things, it seemed, um, important to me to refresh myselves on the arguments around, you know, how we conceptualize mind, and intelligence, and rationality, and, um, other such concepts.

And so we continue on our philosophy of mind journey.

I had wanted to do something from The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle from 1949.

We had only read just the introduction to this in our original Partially Examined Life, episode 21, Philosophy of Mind, 'cause that's the thing that is often excerpted, but it gives you nothing about what his positive view is.

Uh, this, this intro, it's actually called Chapter One: Descartes' Myth, is just purely a critique of Descartes as over intellectualizing everything, as putting by, uh, dividing the world into mind and matter.