For more than forty years, starting with the publication of Ryle's very influential The Concept of Mind in 1949, some of the best of the analytic philosophers have devoted themselves to the question of whether we can find a satisfactory substitute for what Ryle sneeringly called 'the ghost in the machine' - Descartes's picture of human beings as divided into a material body and an immaterial mind. Philosophy of mind is one of the few clear instances of intellectual progress which analytic philosophy has to its credit. If one reads the contributions of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order - Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland - one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won't work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been gradually set aside and better ones posed. Discussion has become steadily more sophisticated.

LRB 21 November 1991 | PDF Download