Ullin Place - Life

Life

Place was born in Yorkshire. He studied under and was strongly influenced by Gilbert Ryle at Oxford University. There, he became acquainted with philosophy of mind in the logical behaviorist tradition, of which Ryle was a major exponent. Although he would later abandon logical behaviorism as a theory of the mind in favor of the type-identity theory, Place nevertheless continued to harbor sympathies toward the behavioristic approach to psychology in general. He even went so far as to defend the radical behaviorist theses of B.F. Skinner, as expressed in Verbal Behavior, from the criticisms of Noam Chomsky and the growing movement of cognitive psychology.

Place, as well as J.J.C. Smart, nevertheless established his place in the annals of analytic philosophy by founding the theory which would eventually help to dethrone and displace philosophical behaviorism - the identity theory. In Is Consciousness a Brain Process?, Place formulated the thesis that mental states were not to be defined in terms of behavior. Rather one must identify them with neural states. With this bold thesis, Place became one of the fathers of the current materialistic mainstream of the philosophy of mind.

His sister, Dorothy E. Smith, is a prominent Canadian sociologist and the founder of the field of institutional ethnography, and his brother, Milner Place, is one of England's leading poets.