born Aug. 19, 1900, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.
died Oct. 6, 1976, Whitby, North Yorkshire
British philosopher, leading figure in the "ordinary language," or "Oxford" school of analytic philosophy .
He became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church College in 1924. He was Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford from 1945 to 1968 and editor of Mind from 1948 to 1971. His major work, The Concept of Mind (1949), rejects Cartesian dualism as the logically incoherent doctrine of the "ghost in the machine" and argues for a "logical behaviourism" according to which attributions of mental states need refer only to the behaviour of bodies and not to any mysterious entity hidden inside them. His other works include Philosophical Arguments (1945), Dilemmas (1954), A Rational Animal (1962), Plato's Progress (1966), and The Thinking of Thoughts (1968).