Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase “the ghost in the machine” – a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate. His own position was that mental acts are not at all distinct from bodily actions. Indeed, they are the same thing, merely described in different ways – and if one cuts through the confusing language of the old philosophical debates, he suggests, that becomes clear. While, in many ways, modern philosophers of mind have moved on from or discarded Ryle’s actual arguments, The Concept of Mind remains a classic example of two central critical thinking skills: interpretation and reasoning. Ryle was what is known as an “ordinary language” philosopher – a school who considered many philosophical problems to exist purely because of philosophical language. He therefore considered his task as a philosopher to be one of cutting through confusing language, and clarifying matters – exemplifying the critical thinking skill of interpretation at its best. Rather than adding to philosophical knowledge as such, moreover, he saw his role as one of mapping it – giving it what he called a “logical geography.” As such, The Concept of Mind is also all about reasoning: laying out, organizing, and systematizing clear arguments.

Take a journey through Jean-Paul Sartre's trans-phenomena of consciousness, into Gilbert Ryle's Linguistic Behaviourism and on to the outer reaches of Wilfrid Sellars' Rylean ancestors and their 'Messianic Behaviourist' Jones. Phenomenology and the Ghost in the Machine begins by investigating a historical connection between Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilbert Ryle. The book exploits this connection to explore an attractive relationship between ordinary language and consciousness, thus providing plenty of chances for readers to learn Sartre's phenomenology and Ryle's linguistic analysis of the mind along the way. This work is a one way ticket to the outer reaches of the mind, arguing that language is insufficient to ground a theory of mind because it fails to capture sublinguistic layers of thought. Only a 'first person science' exploring the nature of mind, and heralded by a return to a Pre-Fregeian Psychologism, can penetrate these mysteries of thought.

Persons and Their Minds compares the conflicting claims of mindism and personism and argues for placing persons at the center of philosophy of mind. Mindism stems from Descartes, takes the spectator stance, and makes the mind the subject of mental verbs such as ?know,? ?think,? and ?believe.? Personism stems from Wittgenstein and Ryle, takes the agent stance, and restores persons to their proper place as subjects of mental verbs.Employing lessons taught by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the book offers a running criticism of mindism as it appears in the work of Descartes, Locke, Davidson, Fodor, Hume, Parfit, Dennett, Searle, McGinn, Flanagan, Chalmers, and Baars, and demonstrates personism's ability to resist various forms of mindism. Intended for upper-level or graduate students of philosophy, Persons and Their Minds should also interest psychologists, psychotherapists, and other professionals who use philosophy of mind in their work.

This collection is devoted to Gilbert Ryle's philosophy of mind and language. It features essays from prominent scholars on the topics of category mistakes, hypotheticals, dispositions, emotion, thinking, perception, and the task–achievement distinction.

This is a collection of the key articles written by renowned Wittgenstein scholar, G.P. Baker, on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, published posthumously. Following Baker’s death in 2002, the volume has been edited by collaborator and partner, Katherine Morris. Contains articles previously only available in other languages, and one previously unpublished paper. Completely distinct from the widely-known work Baker did with P.M.S. Hacker in the Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell Publishing, 1980-1996).

Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures. The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world.

Educating Oneself in Public is a sophisticated, detailed and original examination of the main ideas that have dominated Anglo-American legal philosophy since 1945.

With the entry-level student in mind, Stuart Brown guides the reader through three main topics: whether or not there is life after death; whether or not there is a powerful, beneficent intelligence controlling the universe; and the nature and appropriate defence of religious belief or faith. Each chapter is linked to readings by commentators on religion and belief, such as David Hume, John Hick, Richard Dawkins and William James. Key features also include activities and exercises, chapter summaries and guides to further reading.

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts – visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic – can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations – for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton’s detailed proposals and the themes for research they open. The essays provide an overview of important debates that have Walton’s work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics.

This investigation is a historical review of twentieth-century analytical philosophy in England. In seven chapters, the intellectual development of its most prominent representatives - Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Strawson, Dummett - is traced. The book offers synopses of the main philosophical texts of these seven philosophers. It will serve as a reference book covering all the central problems discussed by these seven authors.