Quotes from Gilbert Ryle

It is a mystery not of the unsolved but soluble type, like the problem of the cause of cancer, but of quite another type.

So what of volitions themselves? Are they voluntary or involuntary acts of mind? Clearly either answer leads to absurdities.

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

Champions of this legend are apt to try to reassimilate knowing how to knowing that by arguing that intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria.

The difference between a normal person and an idiot is not that the normal person is really two persons while the idiot is only one, but that the normal person can do a lot of things which the idiot cannot do;

According to the legend, whenever an agent does anything intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem. But what makes him consider the one maxim which is appropriate rather than any of the thousands which are not?

although there may occur a few stages in his argument which are so trite that he can go through them by rote, much of his argument is likely never to have been constructed before. He has to meet new objections, interpret new evidence and make connections between elements in the situation which had not previously been co-ordinated. In short he has to innovate, and where he innovates he is not operating from habit.

The careful driver is not actually imagining or planning for all of the countless contingencies that might crop up; nor is he merely competent to recognise and cope with any one of them, if it should arise. He has not foreseen the runaway donkey, yet he is not unprepared for it.

He applies in his practice what Aristotle abstracted in his theory of such practices.

The rules that he observes have become his way of thinking, when he is taking care; they are not external rubrics with which he has to square his thoughts.

In a word, he conducts his operation efficiently, and to operate efficiently is not to perform two operations.

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.