In this provocative 1949 work, Ryle proposes that what we think of as the "mind" is little more than an illusion. René Descartes, one of the fathers of philosophy, imagined the mind and body as separate entities, a concept known as "mind-body dualism." Ryle rejected this notion, arguing that mental processes cannot be isolated from the physical world and that our distinction between concepts pertaining to the mind and those pertaining to matter arises from a problematic use of language. The Concept of Mind thus challenges centuries of "dualist" thought, influencing the fields of philosophy and psychology by giving us a new way to think about the mind.