ABSTRACT

This article considers the personal and philosophical relationship between two philosophers, Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. I show that a letter from MacDonald to Ryle found at Linacre College, Oxford, was part of an extensive correspondence, and that the two were intimate friends and philosophical interlocutors, and I explore the relationship between their respective philosophies. MacDonald, who studied with Wittgenstein before coming to Oxford in 1937, deployed and developed Wittgensteinian themes in her own subsequent work. I show that this work was an important source of ideas in Ryle’s philosophy. I examine two episodes: (1) a 1937 symposium in which MacDonald gave the lead paper, and Ryle was a respondent – I argue that Ryle derived his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that from her paper; and (2) Ryle’s rejection in Dilemmas (1953/4) of the central importance of the idea of a ‘category mistake’ – I argue that this may have been in response to MacDonald’s critical review of The Concept of Mind. Along the way I consider the development of MacDonald’s metaphilosophical views, and I shed new light on MacDonald’s remarkable biography.

摘要

本文考虑了两位哲学家玛格丽特·麦克唐纳和吉尔伯特·赖尔之间的个人和哲学关系。我展示了在牛津大学 Linacre 学院发现的 MacDonald 给 Ryle 的一封信是广泛通信的一部分，两人是亲密的朋友和哲学对话者，我探讨了他们各自哲学之间的关系。麦克唐纳在 1937 年来到牛津之前曾师从维特根斯坦，她在随后的工作中部署和发展了维特根斯坦的主题。我表明，这项工作是赖尔哲学思想的重要来源。我研究了两集：（1）1937 年的一次研讨会，麦克唐纳发表了主要论文，莱尔是一名答辩者——我认为莱尔从她的论文中得出了他对知识——如何和知识——的著名区分；心灵的概念。在此过程中，我考虑了麦克唐纳元哲学观点的发展，并为麦克唐纳非凡的传记提供了新的视角。