MAN OF IDEAS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 792, 24 September 1954, Page 22

MAN OF IDEAS

VERYONE is hankering for a message, but I haven't got a message," said Professor Gilbert Ryle, one of Britain’s most distinguished philosophers, in an interview with The Listener last week. He is visiting New Zealand at the invitation of the University of New Zealand and the British Council, and he was interviewed in Wellington, where he attended the annual conference of New Zealand philosophers and read a paper on "Inference." Gilbert Ryle is an alert, wiry dynamo of a man who, at the age of 54, has reached an influential place in his profession as editor of the leading philosoPphical journal, Mind. His contributors come from all parts of the world and have included such New Zealanders as Arthur N. Prior, J. A. Passmore (formerly of Otago University) and Jonathan Bennett. In reply to a question about the place of philosophy in the world ‘today, Professor Ryle said that modern philosophers were just as much concerned with the basic problems of the nature and destiny of man as they were in Kant’s day or in Plato’s day. One of the important functions of philosophy today was precisely to get the bearings between new scientific, ethical, political and aesthetic ideas at the present time. "Recent dévelopments in psychology clearly have some important bearing on our notion of responsibility, the treatment of delinquents and things of that sort," he said. "The discoveries of Freud, fot instance,’ must have made some people wonder whether there’s any room left for ideas like guilt and innocence, whether it isn’t simply now a question of health versus infirmity, and whether sin or crime isn’t just another disease. I don’t think that these new psychological ideas displace ideas of responsibility, right and wrong, and the rest. But the sorting out of the connections between these new medical ideas and the old moral ones is a classic example of a network of philosophical problems that needs to be straightened out today." When we asked him for a philosophic approach to such a human problem as

the fear of atomic warfare, . Professor Ryle said: "I don’t think that the: atomic bomb is any more of a problem than the bow arid arrow was. It is only a sign of greater efficiency in weapon-making. But a disaster might or might not happen in the world through the use of. atomic weapons. That is a question of prophecy, which I’m no better than anyone else at making." Professor Ryle is the author of two books, The Concept of Mind, published in 1949, and Dilemmas, a revision of a series of lectures given at Cambridge University last year. He says that his own particular interest is in what he would call metaphorically "the geography of ideas." Did he think that philosophers today wrote too much for their fellow philosophers and that their language was becoming so technical that other people couldn’t. follow. them? . "In general, it is not true that philosophical writing is full of technical terms," he said. "Symbolic logic is a technical branch of philosophy closely associated with the work of pure mathematicians. It evolved as an aid to solving the problem of mathematical infinity, and it has led to an enormous enlargement of formal logic. It has had a big but indirect influence on formal philosophy in the same way that a new form of toolsharpener indirectly affects carpentry and agriculture. The operator is able to work quicker and more precisely, but a person interested in-the products doesn’t need to understand how they have made this technical advance." Professor Ryle has been an Oxford man all his life, apart from five years as a Welsh Guards officer during the war, some of this time being spent with military intelligence. The latter was one aspect of his life, however, that he didn’t want to talk about. In Who’s Who it is recorded that he was a student at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he took first classes in Classical Honours, Mod: ern Literature, Humanities and Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was Captain of ,the Queen’s College Boat Club and a member of the Trial Eights in 1923. He became a lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1924, and Student and Tutor in Philosophy the following year. Today he is Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy. This is one of three chairs of philosophy at Oxford, he said, After leaving New Zealand he will fly to Canada and the United States, where (continued on next page) a —

he has been invited to lecture at the Universities of Vancouver, California, Minnesota, Harvard and Princeton. The keen local interest in philosophy which he had noticed at the Wellington conference had impressed him, he said. Many excellent New Zealand students had worked with him at Oxford, but he was particularly interested in the work of Professor Arthur N. Prior, of Canterbury College, who was a completely "native-trained" man.