Ghost

We have this phrase "the ghost in the machine" from Gilbert Ryle, who describes it derisively as: 'the dogma of the Ghost in the machine', in his book "The Concept of Mind", Hutchinson 1949.

To retrieve it from Ryle's afterworld Fox has chosen to de-reify the ghost as simply another relational among others observable in the human phenomenal world.  Fox is a follower of Monostone, who advocates in his draft "Theory of Relationality and Solidity" (ToRaS) that the material world is only apparently solid.  That that 'solidity' (apparent materialness) is merely a psychological form that makes up this way of thinking, a form of the human psyche that fails to realise that material cannot mean 'solid', ie substantial, but merely relational as is mind (spirit/geist etc), that the natural psychological gestaltism convenient to humanmind misleads so that it is 'natural' for humankind not to conflate mind with body, but to 'see' them as different as if they are different categories of 'things'.  Ryle's mistake was to believe that logical discourse was an adequate instrument to explain his belief that mind and body were both (in a or any sense) material, solid rather than both being relational merely, and not therefore a "both".  That 'both' are unsolid entities of a 'material' category intrinsically empty, amounting to nothing. Fox is operating in the converse universe to that invented by Ryle, except Ryle quite paradoxically simply reverses Descartes and seems to walk away from the 'reality' of meaning as if a Magritte figure receding.

BACK to Thomas Albert Fox