We now know about J.L. Austin’s important work as a D-Day intelligence officer during WWII, but what about his fellow ordinary language philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford beginning in 1944. Philosopher Jack Copeland writes:

What did Ryle do in the Second World War? Little was known—he was discreet about his life. William Lyons and I decided to find out more about those hidden years. We discovered that Ryle moved in the same shadowy milieu as Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Dilly Knox, and the rest of the British codebreakers and analysts. Ryle was a leading light, and ultimately head, of a small close-knit team housed not far from the famous Bletchley Park. They analysed the daily torrent of Enigma messages emanating from Hitler’s Abwehr intelligence service.

The team was described from on high in the British Secret Intelligence Service as “a team of a brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the Intelligence machine”.

You can read more in “Ryle’s War”, an open access article in the April issue of the Journal of the British Academy:

https://journal.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/articles/14/1/a06