Collected Papers, Volume 1: Critical Essays

340 Pages·2009·1.43 MB·English

by  Gilbert Ryle

Collected Papers
Volume 1
Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and controversial philosophers of
the twentieth century. Long unavailable, Collected Papers Volume 1: Critical
Essays includes many of Ryle’s most important and thought-provoking papers.
This volume contains twenty critical essays on the history of philosophy,
including Plato, Locke and Hume as well as important chapters on Russell and
Wittgenstein. It also includes three essays on phenomenology, including Ryle’s
famous review of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time first published in 1928.
Although Ryle believed phenomenology would ‘end in self-ruinous subjectivism
or in a windy mysticism’ his review also acknowledged that Heidegger was a
thinker of great originality and importance.
While surveying the developments in the philosophy of language and philo-
sophical logic, Ryle sets out his own conception of the philosophers’ role
against that of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Together with the second volume of Ryle’s collected papers and the new
edition of The Concept of Mind, these outstanding essays represent the very
best of Ryle’s work. Each volume contains a substantial foreword by Julia Tan-
ney, providing essential reading for any student of twentieth-century phil-
osophy of mind and language.
Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy
and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, an editor of Mind and a president of
the Aristotelian Society.
Julia Tanney is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent and has
held visiting positions at the Universities of Picardie and Paris-Sorbonne.

COLLECTED PAPERS
VOLUME 1
Critical Essays
Gilbert Ryle
First published 1971 by Hutchinson
This edition published 2009 by Routledge
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© 2009 The Estate of Gilbert Ryle: Hertford College, Oxford
© 2009 Julia Tanney for Foreword
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ryle, Gilbert, 1900–1976
Collected papers / by Gilbert Ryle.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : Hutchinson, 1971.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Philosophy, British – 20th century. I. Title.
B1649.R961 2009
192–dc22
2008054738
ISBN 0-203-87532-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–48548–7 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–87532–X (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–48548–7 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–87532–2 (ebk)
C
ONTENTS
Foreword vii
Introduction xxi
1 Plato’s ‘Parmenides’ 1
2 Review of F. M. Cornford: ‘Plato
and Parmenides’ 47
3 Letters and Syllables in Plato 57
4 The ‘Timaeus Locrus’ 76
5 The Academy and Dialectic 94
6 Dialectic in the Academy 122
7 John Locke on the Human Understanding 132
8 John Locke 154
9 Hume 165
10 Phenomenology 174
11 Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind’ 186
12 Heidegger’s ‘Sein Und Zeit’ 205
13 Review of Martin Farber: ‘The Foundations
of Phenomenology’ 223
14 Discussion of Rudolf Carnap: ‘Meaning
and Necessity’ 233
15 Logic and Professor Anderson 244
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein 258
vi CONTENTS
17 Review of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘Remarks on
the Foundations of Mathematics’ 267
18 G. E. Moore 278
19 Review of ‘Symposium on J. L. Austin’ 282
20 Jane Austen and the Moralists 286
Index 303
F
OREWORD
Why study philosophers of the past? Not only for scholarship, nor,
certainly, for a potted history of philosophical movements. If, pace the early
Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, philosophers and logicians do
have significant things to say, it may be that philosophers of the recent and
remote past do so as well. When looking at the thoughts of past thinkers,
we may find more than the ‘primitive adumbrations of our most prized
thoughts’; we may find that those we first patronisingly thought of as
‘toddlers’ were in fact ‘pioneers’, and those such as Plato, Locke or Mill,
will ‘talk to us across the ages’ as ‘colleagues’ rather than as ‘pupils’
(Ryle 1970, 11). Ryle’s interest in past philosophers was expressly orien-
tated towards the way they would shed light on problems and perplexities
that bothered him; his treatment of them is an exercise in which it is
proper to look for ‘dialectical moves of the same sorts as those which [he],
in the same quandary, would be tempted or proud to make’ (xxiv)*. In
one of several asides lamenting the facile pigeon-holing of philosophical
positions—‘isms’ in philosophy—Ryle acknowledges that though there is
a risk of failing to do justice in expositions that are governed by one’s own
philosophical agenda, ‘... the alternative policy of expounding a thinker’s
thoughts without reference to his puzzles and difficulties is what has given
*Page references with no accompanying title, refer to this edition of Collected Papers
Volume 1.
viii FOREWORD
us our standard histories of philosophy, and that is calamity itself, and not
the mere risk of it’ (xxiv).
What is Ryle’s overriding concern? It is a ‘near life-time of enquiry’
into his own entitlement to be an enquirer. Just what is he doing as
a philosopher in studying language that differs from the linguist, ety-
mologist or philologist? What distinguishes the status of philosophical
assertions from those of a geographer, biologist or chemist? Ayer’s inter-
est in logical positivism indirectly got British philosophers of the 30s to
reflect on the status of their own questions and answers, though they
rejected the Circle’s dictum ‘Either Science or Nonsense’ on the grounds
that it contained too few ‘or’s (1970, 10).
For Ryle, the importance of looking at the work of other philosophers
was strengthened by his visits to the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge.
There, veneration for Wittgenstein was so ‘incontinent’ that Ryle’s
own mentions of other philosophers were greeted by jeers. Although
Wittgenstein properly distinguished exegetical questions from philo-
sophical ones, he also gave the unfortunate impression to be proud not to
have studied them (which he had done, Ryle tells us, but not much).
Wittgenstein was also guilty in not recognising that those who did study
thinkers of the past could be genuine philosophers and not simply aca-
demic ones. The contempt for thoughts other than Wittgenstein’s seemed
to Ryle ‘pedagogically disastrous for the students and unhealthy for
Wittgenstein himself. It made [Ryle] resolve, not indeed to be a philo-
sophical polyglot, but to avoid being a monoglot; and most of all to avoid
being one monoglot’s echo, even though he was a genius and a friend’
(1970, 11). Because he had as a student to learn, and then later to teach
Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant, Ryle recognised that
some of the arguments ‘were potent enough to make comparison of their
author with, say, Wittgenstein’ not only ‘honorific’, but more import-
antly, ‘elucidatory’ of both (1970, 11–12). So it is to the past we now turn
to see how it helps us understand Ryle’s particular concern about the
nature of philosophical enquiry.
The later Plato is credited with pioneering the work for the ‘anti-
nonsense’ philosophers. For he anticipated what was to become crucial
for understanding the role of philosophy as the subject responsible for
distinguishing, not between truths and falsehoods, as do the sciences, but
between expressions which make sense and those which are nonsense. For
according to Ryle, Plato’s Parmenides anticipates most of the ‘logical embar-
FOREWORD ix
rassments’ that were to befall Meinong; Hume’s and Kant’s accounts of
assertions of existence; Kant’s account of forms of judgement and categor-
ies; Russell’s doctrine of propositional functions and theory of types;
and ‘more than any other, nearly the whole of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus’ (46).
In criticising his early (substantial) theory of Forms, Plato was in effect
proving the need for a distinction between different types of universals:
the argument of Parmenides is a primitive attempt to mark out the difference
between formal concepts (such as ‘not’, ‘exist’, ‘some’, ‘other’, ‘single’,
‘several’, ‘is an instance of’ and so forth) which infect every proposition
and are not peculiar to any special topics and proper or material concepts
such as ‘triangle’ which occur in propositions of geometricians or ‘cata-
pult’ in propositions describing shooting. Plato was also exhibiting a form
of philosophical argumentation—the generation of antinomies and logic-
ally vicious regresses by the method of reductio ad absurdum—that Ryle
would adopt as his own ‘flail and winnowing fan’ (220).
Though Locke’s promiscuity with the notion of ‘idea’—and his adop-
tion of one use in particular—was to provide an important target for later
German and English thinkers, one of his important positive contributions
involved a ‘healthy if incomplete manipulation’ of Occam’s razor in deny-
ing the real existence of fictitious objects. It was healthy in so far as, taken
negatively, it elucidates what abstract propositions (those of philosophy
and mathematics) are not about: they are not about real, subsistent objects.
But there ought to be ‘some other and less question-begging way’ of
saying how such propositions are about something though not about
things in nature ‘than by saying that they are about ideas in our minds’
(141).
Locke showed that the truth of the abstract general propositions of pure
mathematics as well as those of moral philosophy does not require the
existence of subsistent objects that actually instantiate the properties
which seem to be indicated by those propositions. As such he is ‘within an
inch’ of saying that such propositions are hypothetical. ‘They do not directly
describe real existences. They say what properties would follow, if something had
certain other properties, and not that anything has them’ (147). It
follows, says Ryle, that geometry does not (as the Cartesians thought, and
as Anderson would later suppose) directly describe the world; more
importantly, nor do many philosophical statements have any ontological
status: they do not describe transcendent entities, but merely say what