Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

The Concept of Mind

London

Hutchinson

1949

"The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe."

here is thus a polar opposition between mind and matter, an opposition which is often brought out as follows. Material objects are situated in a common field, known as 'space', and what happens to one body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as 'minds', and there is, apart from maybe telepathy, no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another. The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear, and jolt one another's bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds, and inoperative upon them.
(p. 13).

Population::Castaway Geography::Island

Reading

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

02/04/2010