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“... Gilbert Ryle, who died in 1976, was for many years a professor of philosophy in Oxford. He was a man of genially military appearance, with a knobbly, cubic head; rather soldierly in speech and manner, he punctuated his sentences with an abrupt half-cough, highly characteristic of him and much imitated. He was an exceptionally nice man, friendly, generous, uncondescending, unpretentious, and, for a well-known professional philosopher, startlingly free from vanity ...”

“... he suffered less and got over it. The next move, to Christ Church, was painless. Oxford gave him Gilbert Ryle as his tutor and appointed him to a lectureship before he graduated. Having volunteered for war service he was drawn, by the irresistible voice of privilege, into a Guards regiment. Thereafter his military career passed through several glamorous ...”

“... extend to an article published in the Observer in 1961 or thereabouts, where he bracketed me with Gilbert Ryle as a ‘behaviourist of logic’, almost certainly without having read Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, or any relevant work of my own. When I protested, he replied in a mildly offensive way that he had read a ...”

“... The​ Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle claimed he had once talked a student out of suicide by pointing out to him that the logic of ‘nothing matters’ is very different from that of, for example, ‘nothing chatters.’ For some who philosophise in this style, Hegel is not one of their tribe but an obscurantist, semi-mystical system-builder who ended up kowtowing to an autocratic Prussian state, and whose thought lies behind the totalitarianism of the 20th century ...”

“... unfair in his report of their views? At one point he certainly goes wrong, for he associates Gilbert Ryle with the bad social scientists. He thinks that Ryle wants to show that mind is ineffective but fails quite to do so. This is wildly mistaken: nothing was further from ...”

“... press the button to initiate this process if it has no thumb with which to press? In the 1950s Gilbert Ryle used the lethal phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ to bring out the sheer absurdity of Cartesian dualism. After Descartes it seemed obvious that one must choose to discard either matter or spirit. Given that the existence of our bodies seems ...”

“... of early cinema. With such things you knew where you were, and a philosopher likes that: Gilbert Ryle, so it is said, thought Schopenhauer and Wodehouse the most sensible authors he knew, and the two who wrote the best. When not studying the one he was relaxing with the other. As well as writing a hundred-odd sensible books, Wodehouse also wrote ...”

“... but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English eccentricity: an older world of indulgence, scandal, fun and wit. It was ...”

“... with language, like so many targets for philosophical investigation, is knowing where to start. Gilbert Ryle drew a rich picture of the philosopher as traffic policeman trying to unpick a jam ‘when crowds of conceptual vehicles, of different sorts and moving in different directions meet at some conceptual crossroads’. We can put the same image in ...”

“... anti-gravitational manner. There are no footnotes (giving a rather prestidigitatory effect, as Gilbert Ryle did with a famous comparable omission), and a reader with some knowledge of the literature will quickly see that there is a great deal more reading behind the text than is mentioned in the bibliographies to each chapter. Asa Briggs’s Victorian ...”

“... to assume that her readers will all be unreconstructed Cartesian dualists still clinging to what Gilbert Ryle famously called the ‘ghost in the machine’. But how does ‘memetics’ resolve the disjunction between the acknowledged findings of psychology and brain science on the one hand and the persistent phenomenological sense of self on the ...”

“... He​ ‘understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence’. Williams’s declared enemies in philosophy – ‘reactionaries’ who sweep everything into a single vision, Kantian ‘progressives’ committed to the view that ethical advance lies in the elaboration of connections between ‘freedom, autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle ...”

“... until he found his feet. This was a time of philosophical transformation, with Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin and others developing the study of natural language and its logic as the primary tool of analytic philosophy. Hart gave a seminar jointly with Austin on legal and moral responsibility, and his legal experience and familiarity with ...”

“... wisdom in philosophy and psychology. Both disciplines were dominated by a distrust of what Gilbert Ryle called ‘the ghost in the machine’ – the elusive, invisible human mind. Talk of mental states, on this view, was empty; subjective experience was unmeasurable and therefore unreal. Chomsky found this unsatisfying. In challenging it, he made ...”

“... heightened the combative atmosphere of academic philosophy. ‘We were all frightened of him,’ Gilbert Ryle said, ‘though few of us have the courage to admit it.’ Austin​ insisted that linguistic phenomenology gave us knowledge not only about words but about the things words are used to talk about, because the distinctions found in natural ...”