Answer:
Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, Sussex, England on 19 August 1900. One of ten children, he came from a prosperous family and enjoyed a liberal and stimulating childhood and adolescence. His father was a general practitioner but had keen interests in philosophy and astronomy that he passed on to his children and an impressive library where Ryle enjoyed being an “omnivorous reader” (Ryle, 1970, 1). Educated at Brighton College (where later in life he would return as a governor) Ryle went to Queen’s College, Oxford in 1919 initially to study Classics, but he was quickly drawn to Philosophy, graduating in 1924 with first-class honours in the new Modern Greats School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. While not particularly sporting, his undergraduate studies were relieved by rowing for his college eight, of which he was captain, and he was good enough to have trials for the University boat. After his graduation in 1924 he was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church College and a year later became tutor. He would remain at Oxford for his entire academic career until his retirement in 1968; in 1945 he was elected to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy. With the outbreak of war Ryle volunteered. He was commissioned in the Welsh Guards, serving in intelligence, and by the end of the War had been promoted to the rank of Major. He became the Editor of Mind after G.E. Moore’s retirement in 1947; a post he held until 1971. Ryle was unstinting in his advice and encouragement to generations of students. With colleagues he was “tolerant (and) uncensorious” (Warnock, xiv), but in philosophical debate he could turn into a formidable opponent, expressing an intense dislike of pomposity, pretence and jargon (Urmson, 271; Gallop, 228). He was also ever ready to challenge both the excessive veneration paid by others to Plato and Classical authors as well as the philosophical positions held by such contemporary colleagues as Collingwood in Oxford or Anderson in Australia. He befriended Wittgenstein whose work, if not his effect on colleagues and students, he greatly admired. “Outstandingly friendly (and) sociable” (Warnock, xiv), he is remembered as an entertaining conversationalist. Despite having turned away from literary studies during his first year at Oxford, sensing he had little aptitude for them, and even though he read little other than the novels of Jane Austen (about whom he wrote authoritatively) and P. G. Wodehouse, the style of Ryle’s writing is often literary and instantly recognizable even after a few sentences (Urmson, 271; Mabbott, 223). A confirmed bachelor, he lived after his retirement with his twin sister Mary in the Oxfordshire village of Islip. Gardening and walking gave him immense pleasure, as did his pipe. He died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby in Yorkshire after a day’s walking on the moors. “Philosophy irradiated his whole life” (Mabbott, 224). He is reputed to have said that the only completed portrait of him made him look like a “drowned German General” (Mabbott, 224).
When Ryle became a young don in the 1920s, philosophers could no longer “pretend that philosophy differed from physics, chemistry and biology by studying mental as opposed to material phenomena” (1971b, vii). Although the turn away from psychologism was laudable, philosophers succumbed instead to what Ryle considered to be a regrettable temptation to look for Objects which were neither mental nor material. Such objects were to be for philosophy what beetles and butterflies are for entomology:
Platonic Forms, Propositions, Intentional Objects, Logical Objects … [and even] Sense Data were recruited to appease our professional hankerings to have a subject matter of our own (1971b, vii).
Ryle’s campaign against the tendency of philosophers to “hypostasise their own terms of art” lasted throughout his career. Even his very first articles carried the “Occamizing” message that “[p]hilosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities” (1971b, vii; these early articles include 1929, 1930a, 1933a, and 1933b).
