Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory," the Cartesians "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language. His plain language and esstentially simple purpose place him in the traditioin of Locke, Berkeley, Mill, and Russell.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• I Descartes' Myth
• 1 The Official Doctrine
• 2 The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine
• 3 The Origin of the Category Mistake
• 4 Historical Note
• II Knowing How and Knowing That
• 1 Foreword
• 2 Intelligence and Intellect
• 3 Knowing How and Knowing That
• 4 The Motives of the Intellectualist Legend
• 5 'In My Head'
• 6 The Positive Account of Knowing How
• 7 Intelligent Capacities versus Habits
• 8 The Exercise of Intelligence
• 9 Understanding and Misunderstanding
• 10 Solipsism
• III The Will
• 1 Foreword
• 2 The Myth of Volitions
• 3 The Distinction Between Voluntary and Involuntary
• 4 Freedom of the Will
• 5 The Bogy of Mechanism
• IV Emotion
• 1 Foreword
• 2 Feelings versus Inclinations
• 3 Inclinations versus Agitations
• 4 Moods
• 5 Agitations and Feelings
• 6 Enjoying and Wanting
• 7 The Criteria of Motives
• 8 The Reasons and Causes of Actions
• 9 Conclusion
• V Dispositions and Occurrences
• 1 Foreword
• 2 The Logic of Dispositional Statements
• 3 Mental Capacities and Tendencies
• 4 Mental Occurrences
• 5 Achievements
• VI Self-Knowledge
• 1 Foreword
• 2 Consciousness
• 3 Introspection
• 4 Self-Knowledge Without Privileged Access
• 5 Disclosure by Unstudied Talk
• 6 The Self
• 7 The Systematic Elusiveness of 'I'
• VII Sensation and Observation
• 1 Foreword
• 2 Sensations
• 3 The Sense Datum Theory
• 4 Sensation and Observation
• 5 Phenomenalism
• 6 Afterthoughts
• VIII Imagination
• 1 Foreword
• 2 Picturing and Seeing
• 3 The Theory of Special Status Pictures
• 4 Imagining
• 5 Pretending
• 6 Pretending, Fancying and Imagining
• 7 Memory
• IX The Intellect
• 1 Foreword
• 2 The Demarcation of the Intellect
• 3 The Construction, Possession and Utilisation of Theories
• 4 The Application and Misapplication of Epistemological Terms
• 5 Saying and Teaching
• 6 The Primacy of the Intellect
• 7 Epistemology
• X Psychology
• 1 The Programme of Psychology
• 2 Behaviourism
• Index

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Gilbert Ryle exerted an influence over academic philosophers in the English-speaking world almost without equal at midcentury. As Waynefleet Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and as G. E. Moore's successor to the editorship of Mind, the most prestigious philosophical journal in Great Britain, Ryle shaped the orientation of philosophical discussion for more than a decade. Independently of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he invented a philosophical method of linguistic analysis, maintaining indeed that systematic confusions in theory stemmed from misleading grammatical expressions. Ryle's most remarkable contribution to philosophy, however, was in the area of philosophy of mind. His crowning achievement was The Concept of Mind (1949). Utilizing his method of linguistic analysis on a discourse about mind and the mental, he maintained that the radical distinction between mind and body, Cartesian dualism, stemmed from category mistakes. A felicitous writer with a distinctively colloquial style free of jargon, Ryle invented phrases---such as "the ghost in the machine" to indicate supposed Cartesian mental substance---that still reverberate in the literature of philosophy and psychology. (Bowker Author Biography)