Review // The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle [1949]

Stylistically engaging and ambitious in scope, this came along early enough in “the split” so as not to be weighed down by excessive commitment to team orthodoxy: its analytic rigor is relaxed and almost conversational in development, taking aim at such a core anchor of modern western philosophy. His critical approach is above all diagnostic, its few polemical cuts well-placed, but the most powerful aspect of the text is its ability to escape the Cartesian prejudices that condition even tools themselves. Of his central target he likens a critical-scientific metaphor “the postulation of [phlogiston] had been the will-o-the-wisp that encourages the adventurous to explore uncharted thickets and then, ungratefully, to chart thickets in maps that make no further mention of those false beacons. Psychological research work will not have been wasted, if the postulate of a special mind-stuff goes the same way.”