Gilbert Ryle Quotes

#1. Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

Gilbert Ryle

#2. When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience."Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world.

Gilbert Ryle

#3. The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... 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.

Gilbert Ryle

#4. My today's self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.

Gilbert Ryle

#5. Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

Gilbert Ryle

#6. Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers

Gilbert Ryle

#7. Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.

Gilbert Ryle

#8. So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

Gilbert Ryle

#9. To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind's eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark.

Gilbert Ryle

#10. Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.

Gilbert Ryle

#11. Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

Gilbert Ryle

#12. Moreover both this constant awareness (generally called 'consciousness'), and this non-sensuous inner perception (generally called 'introspection') have been supposed to be exempt from error.

Gilbert Ryle

#13. It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

Gilbert Ryle

#14. In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.

Gilbert Ryle

#15. A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Gilbert Ryle

#16. The vain man does not think he is vain.

Gilbert Ryle