The Ryle Style

My interest was in the theory of Meaning—horrid substantive!—and quite soon, I am glad to say, in the theory of its senior partner, Nonsense. ... It was in Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and not his Principia Mathematica, in his Meinong articles and his ”On Denoting” and not his epistemology that I found the pack-ice of logical theory cracking. It was up these cracks that Wittgenstein steered his Tractatus.

Sometime in the glorious mid-sixties, I wrote a ‘brilliant’ paper on Gilbert Ryle’s “The Theory of Meaning” for Professor Helen Cartwright’s Philosophy of Language course at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mi. In that paper I showed Ryle’s arguments to be wrong-headed & c. Or so I believed.

   Scott Soames in his article, “Analytic Philosophy in America” that appears in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy captures the spirit of philosophy at Wayne State when he writes:

[T]he philosophy department at Wayne State University, located in downtown Detroit, serving a predominantly lower middle-class and working- class student population. Such was the abundance of available talent, and the enthusiasm of young philosophers entering the profession, that between 1955 and 1970 the philosophy department Wayne acquired a reputation for precision, passion, and fierce analytical argumentation that had few rivals anywhere. Among the prominent philosophers who spent substantial portions of their careers at Wayne were Richard Cartwright, Hector-Neri Castaneda, Edmund Gettier, Keith Lehrer, Michael Mckinsey, George Nakhnikian, Alvin Plantinga, and Robert Sleigh.

The oxygen at Wayne State during the fabulous 1960s was pervasive and invigorating.

   For a great many years, I believed that both Mozart and Ryle were wrong—i. e.,

neither appealed to me; each was too straight forward, too simple. Bach, Haydn and

Beethoven, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and John Wisdom these were my great and exciting models. But my anti-Rylean and anti-Mozartian stances softened a bit with my admiration for Ryle’s famous paper “Categories” and anything by Mozart with a clarinet featured in it. In my later years I have become a Mozart and Ryle enthusiast. I’ll leave Mozart for another time, just saying that with the aforementioned musicians, one knows and feels each one’s music as being without doubt distinctive stylistically. Stylistically the same is true, for me, of Ryle and the aforementioned philosophers. This brings me to Gilbert Ryle’s very stylish paper from ‘The Oxford Review’, No. 1, 1966, entitled “Jane Austen And The Moralists”, a link to which is provided below. This paper of Ryle’s was brought to my attention by Professor Peter Smith of Cambridge University in his blog Logic Matters—the resemblance to my blog’s title is admiringly intentional. My feelings about philosophical ethics run along the same lines as my feelings about aesthetics; both are dreary compared with (say) Jane Austen or Paul Griffiths.

   Ryle’s article on Jane Austen exhibits the virtues of his writing style—concision and flair. Another discernible virtue is that of distinctions with differences:

If cacophony had not forbidden, Emma could and I think would have been entitled Influence and Interference. Or it might have been called more generically Solicitude. Jane Austen’s question here was: What makes it sometimes legitimate or even obligatory for one person deliberately to try to modify the course of another persons life, while sometimes such attempts are wrong? Where is the line between Meddling and Helping?

   Ryle, in addition to his distinguished career as an Oxford don and author of the famous and controversal The Concept of Mind, was for many years the editor of the journal Mind—his tenure was justly acknowledged as a success in the tradition of his predecessor G. E. Moore and of his successor Simon Blackburn. The link to Ryle's Jane Austen is below.

http://www.logicmatters.net/resources/pdfs/JaneAusten.pdf