Blackwell Reference Online

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Gilbert Ryle and his junior colleague, J. L. Austin, were the leading figures of post-World War II Oxford philosophy. Though their aims and methods were different (see below), both are correctly characterized as “ordinary language philosophers.” Unlike Austin, who published only seven papers in his lifetime, Ryle was a prolific writer. Much of what we know about his personal life derives from self-references in his numerous biographical sketches and reviews, and especially from his autobiography. In these various essays he describes his interactions with, and assessments of, the foremost philosophers of the time, among them Wittgenstein, Moore, Collingwood, Carnap, Prichard, H. H. Price, and Austin. His autobiography is to be found in Ryle , edited by O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher (1970) . Although it is only fifteen pages long, it is wittily self-deprecating, devastating in its depiction of the state of philosophy in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s, packed with information, and instructive with respect to his philosophical development. About Oxford philosophy he says: During my time as an undergraduate and during my first years as a teacher, the philosophical kettle in Oxford was barely lukewarm. I think that it would have been stone cold but for Prichard, who did bring into his chosen and rather narrow arenas vehemence, tenacity, unceremoniousness, and a perverse consistency that ... log in or subscribe to read full text