Introduction

Abstract

The essays in this collection are on a philosophical myth. I call it ‘the myth of the inner and outer’. It is behind what Gilbert Ryle calls ‘the myth of the ghost in the machine’.¹ But it is also behind what might be called ‘the myth of a machine with a ghost in it’, or, more generally, ‘the myth of the world as external’. In brief, the myth divides what, to the philosophically unindoctrinated (and even to the indoctrinated in their non-philosophical moments) is undivided, into two distinct things — one inner (‘mental’) and one outer (‘physical’).