50 Quotes by Gilbert Ryle

The vain man does not think he is vain.

Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'.

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

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

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.

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

Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

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.

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