Thinker · TH-0025
A. J. Ayer
Alfred Jules Ayer was a British philosopher who taught at University College London and Oxford. His first book brought the logical positivism of the…
Also known as Alfred Jules Ayer, Freddie Ayer
1910 – 1989 · London, Oxford
Traditions: Analytic
Schools: Logical positivism
Alfred Jules Ayer was a British philosopher who taught at University College London and Oxford. His first book brought the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle to an English-speaking readership in a sharp, polemical form. He is best known for the verification principle and for emotivism, the view that moral statements do not state facts but express the speaker's feelings of approval or disapproval.
Key ideas
- A statement is literally meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable.
- Traditional metaphysics, which claims to go beyond all possible experience, is on this test literally meaningless.
- Moral judgements express emotion and aim to arouse it in others; they are neither true nor false.
- Philosophy's proper task is the clarification of concepts, not the discovery of a reality behind experience.
Major works
- Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
- The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940)
- The Problem of Knowledge (1956)
In the conversation
- Question Is “who are you to judge?” a moral position, or just a way of ending the conversation?
- Question Can someone walk me through the Frege–Geach problem without the jargon?
- Debate Austin answered the argument from illusion, but the argument from hallucination survives him
- Reading group Reading group: A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6