ABSTRACT
The Cartesian dualism of mind and body was a stalking horse for Gilbert Ryle from very early on in his career. To show that R. Descartes’ ideas were irrelevant to logical concerns was, from his point of view, the important first step towards the acknowledgement that there are in fact no concerns whatsoever to which they are relevant. Ryle himself had used a depsychologised conception of logic and philosophy to castigate Descartes’ views as the myth of the ghost in the machine. Indeed the depsychologising of logic which both of them advocated required that they did, for it was essentially the relevance of Cartesian ideas to logic that they called into question. Whereas F. H. Bradley’s depsychologising of judgments was ultimately a deitemising account, G. Frege’s depsychologising of arithmetic and therefore logic remained an itemising account. Bradley’s depsychologising of logic arose directly out of considerations about the nature of judgment.
