Critical Reception
The Concept of Mind has been compared to Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness by Iris Murdoch, who writes that English analytic philosophy shares the same general orientation as continental philosophy. Ryle has been interpreted by David Stannard as maintaining that the psychoanalytic idea of the unconscious is rooted in the Cartesian conception of a body-mind dichotomy and as such is one version of the "Ghost in the Machine" fallacy. According to Stannard, Ryle views the dogma as a logical error based on a category mistake.
Richard Webster praises The Concept of Mind for what he sees as its clarity and strength of argument, but suggests that while Ryle's arguments effectively dissolve the mind-body problem, they have failed to bring about a revolution in human knowledge. Webster attributes this to the fact that Ryle's case that subjective aspects of experience such as sensation, memory, consciousness and sense of self are not the essence of "mind" has not been universally accepted by contemporary philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists. Webster believes that Ryle's willingness to accept the characterization of The Concept of Mind as behaviorist misrepresents its more nuanced position, writing that Ryle's acceptance of that description is not harmless, as Ryle himself suggested. Webster stresses that Ryle does not deny the reality of what are often called internal sensations and thoughts, but simply rejects the idea that they belong to a realm logically distinct from and independent of the external realm of ordinary human behaviour.
Ryle has been characterized as an "ordinary language" philosopher. The book's style of writing has attracted comment. Stuart Hampshire remarked in a review in Mind that, "There is only one property which I can discover to be common to Professor Ryle and Immanuel Kant; in both cases the style is the philosopher - as Kant thought and wrote in dichotomies, Professor Ryle writes in epigrams. There are many passages in which the argument simply consists of a succession of epigrams, which do indeed effectively explode on impact, shattering conventional trains of thought, but which, like most epigrams, leave behind among the debris in the reader's mind a trail of timid doubts and qualifications."
Its style of writing was commented on more negatively by Herbert Marcuse, who observes that the way in which Ryle follows his presentation of "Descartes' Myth" as the "official doctrine" about the relation between body and mind with a preliminary demonstration of its "absurdity" which evokes "John Doe, Richard Roe, and what they think about the 'Average Taxpayer'" shows a style that moves "between the two poles of pontificating authority and easy-going chumminess", something Marcuse finds to be characteristic of philosophical behaviorism. John Searle, who believes that no great work of philosophy contains many footnotes and that philosophical quality varies inversely with the number of bibliographical references, considers the absence of footnotes in The Concept of Mind a sign of its quality.
The term "ghost in the machine" has since been used by others, notably Arthur Koestler, who used the phrase as the title of his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967).
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