Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher,[7] principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine."

"[8] Having studied the philosophers Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, Ryle suggested that the book instead "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label.

A capable linguist, he was recruited into intelligence work and by the end of the war had been promoted to the rank of Major.

[13] Ryle's brothers John Alfred (1889–1950) and George Bodley (1902–1978), both educated at Brighton College, also had eminent careers.

The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess.

[18]Ryle thought it no longer possible to believe that a philosopher's task is to study mental as opposed to physical objects.

In its place, Ryle saw a tendency of philosophers to search for objects whose nature was neither physical nor mental.

The philosopher must show the directions and limits of different implication threads that a "concept contributes to the statements in which it occurs."

But in the 1960s and 1970s, the rising influence of the cognitivist theories of Noam Chomsky, Herbert A. Simon, Jerry Fodor, and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant.

The two major postwar schools in the philosophy of mind, Fodor's representationalism and Wilfrid Sellars's functionalism, posited precisely the 'internal' cognitive states that Ryle had argued against.

[26] Author Richard Webster endorsed Ryle's arguments against mentalist philosophies, suggesting in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) that they implied that "theories of human nature which repudiate the evidence of behaviour and refer solely or primarily to invisible mental events will never in themselves be able to unlock the most significant mysteries of human nature.