ABSTRACT
During the last quarter of a century Oxford has occupied, or reoccupied, a position it last held, perhaps, six hundred years ago: that of a great centre of philosophy in the Western world. It is characteristic of philosophers to reflect on their own activity in the same spirit as they reflect on the objects of that activity; to scrutinize philosophically the nature, the aims, and the methods of philosophical scrutiny. In Professor Ryle's work, as in that of few other philosophers, the thought and the style are one: the accumulation of image and epigram, the sharp antithesis, the taut and balanced sentences are not decorative additions to his argument, but the very form of his thought. A system of conventions can be modified to meet needs which we can imagine existing before the system existed. Obviously both a comparative general theory of meaning and a comprehensive semantic theory for a particular language must be equipped to deal with these points.
