Ryle was born in Brighton, educated at Oxford, and after teaching from 1924 to 1945 at Christ Church, became professor at Oxford. His earliest interests were in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger. But from the 1930s onwards he absorbed the influence of the later work of Wittgenstein, becoming a fierce advocate of the kind of attention to language demanded by Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. His Concept of Mind (1949) is a sustained attack on the Cartesian philosophy of mind, or dogma of the ‘ghost in the machine’. The behaviourism it substitutes is a little too brisk, but Ryle did a great deal to lay the groundwork for late developments such as functionalism. The brio and verve of his work are unusual in analytical philosophy, and come out further in Dilemmas (1953), and Plato’s Progress (1966).