peter frederick strawson in memoriam - … · metalogicon (2007) xx, 2 111 peter frederick strawson...

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Metalogicon (2007) XX, 2 111 Peter Frederick Strawson In Memoriam Strawson on Gilbert Ryle Giuseppina Randazzo I interviewed Professor Strawson on Gilbert Ryle in sommer 1993 and recorded the pleasant colloquium. (First Part) I asked him: What did you make of him (sc. Gilbert Ryle) as a person? “He was extremely English for one thing… tall, very straight, rather soldierly in bearing; very straight forward, not highly aesthetic. I remember once he said to me when I’d been to a concert… “Oh, been hearing some tunes?”. But still he had a very fine sense of the English language… a great stylist. Somebody asked him once “Do you ever read novels Gilbert?” and he said “Yes all six of them every year”. Do you know what he meant? He meant the novels of Jane Austen, who he greatly admired as a stylist and a novelist… He was witty, good company, fond of drink and in his youth a sportsman”. Who did he choose as his friends? Who did he gravitate towards? “Well, his colleagues I suppose. He wasn’t married, nor do I know of any romantic relationship in his life.” It is true that Ryle was the founder of the Oxford School? “He did a great deal to promote the philosophical standing of the Oxford School… in general the graduate school flourishes in Oxford, partly because of his influence… also of course the

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Page 1: Peter Frederick Strawson In Memoriam - … · Metalogicon (2007) XX, 2 111 Peter Frederick Strawson In Memoriam Strawson on Gilbert Ryle Giuseppina Randazzo I interviewed Professor

Metalogicon (2007) XX, 2

111

Peter Frederick Strawson

In Memoriam

Strawson on Gilbert Ryle

Giuseppina Randazzo

I interviewed Professor Strawson on Gilbert Ryle in sommer 1993 and recorded the pleasant colloquium.

(First Part) I asked him: What did you make of him (sc. Gilbert Ryle) as a person? “He was extremely English for one thing… tall, very straight, rather soldierly in bearing; very straight forward, not highly aesthetic. I remember once he said to me when I’d been to a concert… “Oh, been hearing some tunes?”. But still he had a very fine sense of the English language… a great stylist. Somebody asked him once “Do you ever read novels Gilbert?” and he said “Yes all six of them every year”. Do you know what he meant? He meant the novels of Jane Austen, who he greatly admired as a stylist and a novelist… He was witty, good company, fond of drink and in his youth a sportsman”. Who did he choose as his friends? Who did he gravitate towards? “Well, his colleagues I suppose. He wasn’t married, nor do I know of any romantic relationship in his life.” It is true that Ryle was the founder of the Oxford School? “He did a great deal to promote the philosophical standing of the Oxford School… in general the graduate school flourishes in Oxford, partly because of his influence… also of course the

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brilliance of his own writing, mistaken as he was sometimes, was a great contribution.” And the philosophy of mind? “He was a modest man said of his own book, ‘It is a generation’, that’s to say it was influential for a generation. That’s not to say it’s forgotten, it’s still worth reading (it’s well written for one thing), but it hasn’t got the influence now that it did have.” There is an Italian word ‘prosecutore’ which means successor, someone who develops someone else’s work. People have said that you are Ryle’s prosecutore. How do you react? “Well, I’m his successor in the formal sense that I succeeded him in the chair that he occupied. But I don’t think my thought is particularly close to his. Except that I share his anti-Cartesianism.” Could you make a general picture of Ryle’s thought? “It’s difficult, because there’s different divisions to him as a student of classical philosophy. There’s him as a theorist of language and thought. And there’s finally him as a philosopher of mind. There’s also the book of “Dilemmas”, where he tries to show that many classical puzzles are in a sense due to misunderstanding that can be resolved. I think he wanted to exhibit the mind as a locus of abilities, capacities to do things”.

(Second Part) To introduce the following questions I made a historical recapitulation concerning the importance of the Oxford School starting from Ryle, dwelling on the successes reached in the field of the philosophy of mind, by the American school, and then I asked: So, firstly, what do you think about Putnam’s study, and secondly, how do you react to Dennet and Hofstadter’s thought?

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“The persons who wish to account for human intelligence in neurophysiological terms? Well I’m sure there are all sorts of interesting scientific discoveries that have been made, but as for casting light on concepts we ordinarily employ in talking about human thought, I don’t think there’s much to be gained philosophically from that at all. Nor did Ryle”. And about Putnam’s study… What are the advantages of a scientific language? “It’s a question of what you want to do. If you want to know something about the internal sub-personal functioning of the brain, obviously you go in for a scientific investigation. But if you want to understand the concepts we ordinarily employ… the that has a little interest for you. And I think that Ryle would have said the same”. Is an alliance between philosophy and science possible? “What Quine worships is two things, Physics and Logic, and he is on record as saying ‘The philosophy of science is the philosophy of mind’, and also ‘philosophy… is continuous with science’. So there you have it, the paradigm of the case (of assumption) that philosophy and science are one… I remember him saying once ‘I’ve got everything down to numbers’ ”. Do you agree with that. Can there be an alliance? “No. An alliance… I don’t see there need be any hostility, it’s just that each must, in my view, respect the territory of the other” Do you think the American School took the place of Oxford School? “I think it’s probably true that in what you might cal analytic philosophy, in general, England and particularly Oxford were perhaps dominant in the Fifth’s and Sixth’s, and this is perhaps no longer the case, and in the Anglophone world American philosophers now have the predominance”.

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Which philosophical tradition influenced the Oxford School? “Our own. That’s so say, of course, we are all in a sense inheritors off the age of empiricism… Russell… Austin”. What are the differences between your thought and Ryle’s thought concerning categories? Non mi rispose ma mi disse, porgendomi la nuova edizione di Freedom and Resentment and other Essays, che lì avrei trovato la risposta. What other differences of opinion do you have with Ryle? “Well, certainly on the logical area of categories… as regards his philosophy of mind, well he makes a lots of good points. Also some mistakes. I think, about perception for example, which he wrote about in Dilemmas,… so in general I think he was a bit limited by being insufficiently sensitive to the subjective side of human experience. Hence the kind of refined or modified behaviouristic tendency in his writing” Do you think Ryle was a logician? “No”. Did Ryle use a particular approach in order to suppress the Cartesian myth? “He used a certain approach… in order to suppress the Cartesian myth? Well, he certainly used various devices to do that… He was much more influenced by Wittgenstein… the second… it’s true that the later Wittgenstein was his great influence, and ha was indeed a friend”. So, how did he attack Cartesianism? “If you read The Concept of Mind, you noticed that he was a kind of refined behaviourist… you can see this in the Italian title… That’s to say, the mind manifests itself in what we do or say. So he shared, I think, some of the mistakes of Wittgenstein, playing down inner experience to a large degree”.

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Could you tell me something about Ryle as a classical philosopher? “He was classically trained, and wrote a good deal about Plato, and indeed he was bold enough to write a life of Plato, which was a good imaginative exercise”. With reference to the text Negation1 by Ryle in which the author believes, contrary to mr Abbot, that negative propositions can be true, Strawson said: “Ryle was obviously correct in saying that negative propositions can perfectly be true, and one can know them be true, thus as Russell once tried to persuade Wittgenstein, ‘there is not an hippopotamus in this room’, which was something they both accepted as known”.

1 G. Ryle, Negation, in “Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society”, suppl. To vol. IX (1929), repr. in Collected Papers, ed. Thoemmes, Bristol 1971, pp. 1-11.