Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle was born in 1900 in Brighton, and educated at Brighton College and The Queen's College, Oxford. He received a traditional classical education, but also taught himself French, German and Italian. After working in the intelligence service during World War II Ryle became Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford in 1945 and held this post until 1968, helping to establish Oxford as an important centre for the study of philosophy.

He was the author of many articles on this subject, as well as the books Dilemmas (1954) and Plato's Progress (1966), and was Editor of the philosophical journal Mind from 1947 to 1971. He is best-known, however, for his first book The Concept of Mind (1949), which refutes the traditional metaphysical view of dualism of mind and body, which he famously described as 'the ghost in the machine'. In the years before his death in 1976, Ryle had published a number of papers dealing with the nature of thought. These were published posthumously in 1979, in a volume called On Thinking.