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A guest post by Jack Copeland:
2026 is the 50th anniversary of Gilbert Ryle’s death.
One of Britain’s most celebrated philosophers of mind, Ryle was elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford in 1944. He was a grand architect of the movement known as Oxford ordinary language philosophy, together with his fellow radical and arch-rival J.L. Austin. Recently Austin turned out to have been a war hero, as Mark Rowe revealed in his outstanding J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer.
What did Ryle do in the Second World War? Little was known—he was discreet about his life. Bill Lyons and I decided to find out more about those hidden years. We discovered that Ryle moved in the same shadowy milieu as Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Dilly Knox, and the rest of the British codebreakers and analysts. Ryle was a leading light, and ultimately head, of a small close-knit team housed not far from the famous Bletchley Park. They analysed the daily torrent of Enigma messages emanating from Hitler’s Abwehr intelligence service.
The team was described from on high in the Secret Intelligence Service as “a team of a brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the Intelligence machine”.
You can read more in “Ryle’s War”, an open access article in the April issue of the Journal of the British Academy:
https://journal.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/articles/14/1/a06
Jack Copeland