The Revolution in Philosophy

Ryle's introduction argues that the revolution in early twentieth-century philosophy is best understood as a turn toward meaning: the new philosophy's defining preoccupation is with sense and reference, with how expressions come to have the logical powers they do. He rejects the reading that this revolution is identical with any single school, including ordinary language philosophy. The collection covers Frege, Russell, Moore, both early and late Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, not just the Oxford analysts. Ryle also draws a line between the philosopher's problems and the formal logician's technical apparatus, treating the new logic as a tool taken over for philosophical purposes rather than as the revolution's essence . The introduction thus historicizes analytic philosophy without reducing it to a manifesto.

The introduction can be read as Ryle stepping back from his own practice to characterize the movement in which The Concept of Mind participated. His emphasis on meaning as the revolution's central concern aligns with the method of conceptual cartography: philosophical puzzles arise from misconstruals of how expressions function, and the remedy is attention to logical grammar. Yet the introduction does not simply generalize Ryle's own procedure into the movement's definition. By including the Vienna Circle, Frege, and the formal-logical strand within the revolution's scope, Ryle acknowledges that analytic philosophy was broader than the ordinary language approach he practiced. The text thus functions as a meta-philosophical frame for the kind of work Ryle had been doing since the 1930s, without claiming that frame as the revolution's only legitimate form.

Contemporary reviews were mixed. The Spectator's reviewer praised the individual essays—especially Ayer on the Vienna Circle and Paul on Wittgenstein—but judged the book unsatisfactory as a whole, complaining that it 'has apparently had no editor' and lacked coordination, illustration, and a bibliography . The Review of Metaphysics found the coverage 'spotty' and some treatments 'so brief and sketchy as to be of dubious value,' though it singled out Ryle's introduction and the concluding papers by Strawson and Warnock as 'pleasant and instructive' . Later scholars have pushed back against a different misreading: the collection is sometimes taken as a manifesto of ordinary language philosophy, an interpretation that ignores its coverage of Frege, Russell, and the Vienna Circle and misidentifies the revolution Ryle describes .

The volume originated as a series of BBC Third Programme broadcasts, and its eight essays retain the accessible, semi-popular register of that format . The Spectator noted that the original broadcasts 'sounded as if they had had no producer,' and the book version, in that reviewer's judgment, suffered from a similar lack of editorial shaping . The talks were aimed at interested laypeople, but the published collection often assumes more background than a lay reader would possess. This origin explains both the book's brevity and its unevenness: each contributor addressed a slice of the movement in a format suited to radio, and the resulting chapters vary in depth and scope. The transition from broadcast to book did not involve substantial revision or integration, which is why reviewers found the volume useful for those already familiar with the material but less helpful for newcomers.

Later historians have questioned the 'revolution' framing itself. One critic has argued that the language of revolution carries a false view of British philosophy's history, functioning ideologically to encourage students to ignore earlier philosophers rather than describing a genuine rupture . Others have noted that Ryle's separation of philosophy from formal logic, while practically motivated, understates the extent to which work in logic was constitutive of analytic philosophy rather than merely instrumental to it . The collection's coverage is also selective: it focuses on the British and Austrian strands and says little about the later development of formal semantics or the naturalistic turn in philosophy of mind. It remains a valuable document of how the movement's participants understood themselves in 1956, but it is not a neutral or comprehensive history.