Abstract

Common sense assures me I am free and responsible for my actions, but on the other hand it is admitted that my way of acting is determined by temperament, heredity and environmental conditioning. Is man an autonomous centre of consciousness expressing himself in feeling-revealing behaviour, or is ‘man’ a short-hand expression for a bundle of heterogeneous phenomena? Ryle believes that the conceptual geography of ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘he’ is not yet satisfactorily established. But in his view such mental perplexities are growing pains that merely indicate one is in a healthy state. We are familiar with the concrete, but unsure about the abstract, and it is very rare that we are fully aware of all the logical powers of the expressions that we use.