Collected Papers by Gilbert Ryle (review)

346 BOOK REVIEWS Collected Papers (2 vols.). By GILBERT RYLE. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 1 Pp. 301. $16.50. 2 Pp. 504. $19.50. These two volumes include all Professor Gilbert Ryle's published writings, save for his books and a few reviews and obituary notices, up to 1968, when he retired from the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. But they do not include all his work, for already some further papers have appeared and we may reasonably hope for yet more; Ryle is still an active philosopher. There would be little point in a critical examination of these papers, seriatum, at this stage. Some of the most influential, such as Systematically Misleading Expressions, were published in the early thirties, have already been much discussed, and no longer exactly represent Ryle's views. Such papers are now part of the history of philosophy. Others are on highly specialized topics, such as the authorship of the Timaeus Locrus, on which a casual comment in a general review would be worthless. The main critical interest in the volumes as a whole must lie in the broad view that they present of a substantial part of the life's work of a very eminent philosopher. Volume I contains critical and historical essays on the work of other philosophers; Volume II contains Ryle's own original work. In the earlier essays in Volume II, as Ryle himself notes, three general interests are rarely far beneath the surface. The first of these is the nature and aims of philosophical inquiry; the second is ontology pursued in an economical spirit; the third is the general conditions of significant utterance. The nature of philosophy is the avowed topic of Dilemmas, not reprinted here, and of the Inaugural Lecture " Philosophical Arguments," which is. But the question is also very clearly raised in " Systematically Misleading Expressions," "Ordinary Language," and "Proofs in Philosophy," while some of the essays on more specific topics appear to be in part specimina philosophandi. There is no reason to suppose that the topic of the paper " On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong" lacked intrinsic interest for Ryle; but part of its interest was surely to illustrate a type of absurdity which could arise from neglect of a certain type of conceptual nuance, which in turn illustrated the general nature of philosophical inquiry. On this topic Ryle's views seem to have developed but not radically changed. Initially, philosophy is regretfully assigned the purely negative role of showing the source of philosophical paradoxes to be the misunderstanding of idiom. Later, philosophy is more positively "conceptual cartography," the exhibition of the nature and interconnection of our concepts; but still the detection and even construction of absurdities remains an important methodological device. We learn about the legitimate roles of concepts in part by discovering what we cannot do with them and why. It is superficially easy to see how this view of philosophy ties in with the more ontological papers. For one form of conceptual confusion that BOOK REVIEWS 847 can arise from misunderstanding language is to take expressions as denoting objects when they do not, or as denoting one sort of object when they denote another. By earlier calling Ryle an economical ontologist I alluded to the fact that Ryle finds us making over-long rather than over-short inventories of the world because of such confusions. Conceptual confusion is regarded as leading us to invent bogus entities, not to overlook genuine ones. So the papers " On Propositions " and " Imaginary Objects " exclude their subjects from the world, while " Systematically Misleading Expressions " gives us a set of recipes for exposing a host of pretenders. Nor is the interest in ontological parsimony purely an early one; the late papers on thinking arise from the need to give an account of thinking that will be sufficiently " thick " without resorting to bogus mental processes and objects. At the same time these papers are concerned with general diagnoses of the conditions of significant discourse, as are those on " Categories " and "Heterologicality." The continual danger for the philosopher is that he will lapse into conceptual confusion rather than into falsehood. Some of these confusions will no doubt...