Scan barcode
ralowe's review
3.0
i might not be that into "analytic philosophy", but i just keep reading it. cybernetic social analysis for what? was brought here by the grace of the little description debates, queer literary sociologist heather love's co-organizing of "description across the disciplines" academic conference held at private ivy league columbia university in the city of new york in upper manhattan in the wood auditorium of avery hall thursday, april 23, 2015, wherein professor love's point was a criticism of the practice of thick description in the humanities (this long sentence is supposed to be an illustrative joke). love's disregard of "thick description", a term traced to anthropologist clifford geertz who got it from ryle, is a challenge to all my seemingly inexhaustible and ongoing research labors. it's the effect of when the hermeneuts have contact with the social scientists, and it's apparently a little bit of an ethical debate of description vs. narration. on the description side, if you're an anticolonial analyst who feels exegesis only serves to transmit the human (or, merely someone with not a lot of free time), is a lot of folks that i'm just gonna go ahead and characterize as mechanistic reductionists, no better than the descartes y'all loathe. i read this book to dissolve my own caked-in dualisms. what i found was agency as a rigid causal machine that eschews all refusing to yield to empirical perusal. and i don't really care for language philosophy because of the endless confusing analogies. a woman at a noise show offered that i should take the analogies as "thought experiments." compare whenever a heremeut got a point they have an object that makes the idea easier to track. i gather the canonical significance of this text but i found it so plodding. i didn't disagree with the woman at the noise show when she emoted that ryle's writing is beautiful. i just couldn't stop thinking about systems theory and the cold detachment it accompanies and tech bros in my neighborhood. why do i keep reading these things? okay, so this is ryle's example of a non-dualistic world; the intangible occult mystery of how the mind interacts with the body, a single motion. the mind must obviously be something tangible, materiality of agency. but why is it so cold here? but then what of the occult netherworld of the affective unseen? i can't let the (illusion... ah, don't read wegner!) of mind and all of its intoxicating fantasies go...
schumacher's review
2.0
Reasoning that comes off as cloying and pedantic, frequent seeming misrepresentations of the position Ryle argues against (although it's very hard to tell, since he doesn't give explicit references to books he thinks get things wrong), terminological distinctions which don't match up with my everyday understandings of words (which explicitly clashes with Ryle's supposed plain English style), a literary style which comes off as someone who loves Wittgenstein but isn't nearly as clever... Doesn't matter how many of his conclusions I agree with or feel kinship with, this book is a flop stylistically.
untravel's review against another edition
2.0
A deeply flawed work. It starts from a worthwhile point (the problem of other minds is a pseudo-problem) but then immediately stumbles into a faulty conclusion (therefore 'minds' don't really exist as discrete entities). From this error, Ryle sews together an elaborate patchwork quilt on all the things that need to be true in order for his initial premise to be true. It doesn't work out so well.
The result is an argument to the effect that Ryle thinks that I don't think the way I think I think. And if that sounds absurd, it's because it is. At every turn he is forced to butcher and mangle the English language to fit his theory. None of the words the English language uses to refer to mental phenomena really mean what we think they mean, Ryle explains. At length.
What struck me about this, is that while I've heard he is often grouped with other 'ordinary language' philosophers, he's doing something quite different. Rather than using an analysis of ordinary language to 'fix' philosophical problems, he tries to use his theory to 'fix' ordinary language. In this, he has more in common with the formal logic aficionados (who also wanted to solve problems by 'fixing' language) than someone like Austin. It didn't work out so well for them, and it doesn't work here.
The result is an argument to the effect that Ryle thinks that I don't think the way I think I think. And if that sounds absurd, it's because it is. At every turn he is forced to butcher and mangle the English language to fit his theory. None of the words the English language uses to refer to mental phenomena really mean what we think they mean, Ryle explains. At length.
What struck me about this, is that while I've heard he is often grouped with other 'ordinary language' philosophers, he's doing something quite different. Rather than using an analysis of ordinary language to 'fix' philosophical problems, he tries to use his theory to 'fix' ordinary language. In this, he has more in common with the formal logic aficionados (who also wanted to solve problems by 'fixing' language) than someone like Austin. It didn't work out so well for them, and it doesn't work here.
More...