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Ryle's Last Thoughts on Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Thomas A. Goudge
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

Ten years ago in a Critical Notice of Ryle's Collected Papers (Dialogue 11/4 [1972], 600) I remarked that among its various essays those on the topic of thinking were the most impressive. There were half a dozen of them, written at intervals between 1951 and 1968. The puzzlement that provoked them went on unabated until the end of his life, as is shown by a posthumous collection of papers on the topic now published under the title On Thinking. They were all written after 1968, and one even appeared in print in 1976, the year of his death. The papers thus continue Ryle's dedicated, multi-faceted attack on what he regarded as an elusive multi-faceted problem. In this critical notice I shall comment on the last phase of a philosophical campaign of more than a quarter of a century and attempt an assessment of its upshot.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1982

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References

1 Ryle, Gilbert, “Thinking and Self-Teaching”, Rice University Studies 58/3 (Summer 1972); reprinted in On Thinking.Google Scholar

2 Ryle, Gilbert, On Thinking, ed. Kolenda, Konstantin with a Preface by Warnock, G. J. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). There is a typographical mix-up on 39, lines 16ff.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., 17.

4 Cf. The Concept of Mind (1949), chapter 10. For an anti-Rylean critique on this issue see Fodor, J., Psychological Explanation (1968)Google Scholar, and for a rebuttal see Dennett, D. C., Brainstorms (1978), chapter 6Google Scholar.

5 On Thinking, 23. The notion of “adverbial verbs” was introduced in “Thinking and Reflecting” (1967) and briefly treated in “The Thinking of Thoughts” (1968). Cf. Collected Papers (1971), vol. 2, 467–468; 486–487.

6 On Thinking, 31.

7 Ibid., 55.

8 Ibid., 52.

9 Ibid., 63.

10 Ibid., 124.

11 Cf. Peirce, C.S., Collected papers, ed. Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., and Burks, A. (8vols.; 1931–58), 2.220 et seq; 5.266 et seq;etc.Google Scholar

12 On Thinking, 74–75.

13 Ibid., 129.

14 Cf. Crick, F. H. C., “Thinking about the Brain”, Scientific American 241/3 (09 1979), 219232; note especially 221.Google Scholar

15 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.546; 6.338; etc.

16 Cf. Young, J. Z., Programs of the Brain (1978).Google Scholar

17 Sloman, A., The Computer Revolution in Philosophy (1978), 196200Google Scholar; and MacKay, D. M. in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (1979), 302304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This is a review of Sloman's book.