Alfred Jules Ayer
Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Alfred Jules Ayer
Birth 29 October 1910(1910-10-29)
Death 27 June 1989 (aged 78)
School/tradition Analytic
Main interests Language, Epistemology, Ethics, Meaning, Science
Notable ideas Logical positivism, verification principle, emotivist ethics
Influenced by
Influenced

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989), better known as A. J. Ayer or 'Freddie' to friends, was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956).

Ayer was the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959, when he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952. He was knighted in 1970.

Contents

Life

Ayer was born into a wealthy family of continental origin. His mother was from the Dutch-Jewish family which later went on to found the Citroën car company in France. His father was a Swiss Calvinist who worked for the Rothschild family. He grew up in St John's Wood, London. He was educated at Ascham St Vincent's School and Eton, and then won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He served in the British military during World War II, working for the SOE. He was a noted social mixer and womanizer, and was married four times, including to Dee Wells and Vanessa Lawson (mother of Nigella Lawson). Reputedly he liked dancing and attending the clubs in London. He was a keen supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and was a well known face in the crowd, known to other fans as 'the prof'[citation needed].

He was a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire.

Ayer was in fact not an agnostic, a common misconception.[2] and followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston on the topic of religion.

Between 1945 and 1947, together with Russell and George Orwell, he contributed a series of articles to Polemic, a short-lived British 'Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics' edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.[3][4]

Ayer was closely associated with the British humanist movement. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostics' Adoption Society and in the same year succeeded Julian Huxley as president of the British Humanist Association, a post he held until 1970. In 1968 he edited The Humanist Outlook, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism.

He taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: 'Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world,' to which Ayer replied: 'And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men'.[5] Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.

Shortly before his death in 1989 he received publicity after having an unusual near-death experience, which has often been misinterpreted as a move away from his lifelong and famous religious skepticism. Of the experience, Ayer first said that it 'slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be.'[6] However, a few days later he revised this, saying 'what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief'. Ayer was the BBC's famous atheist front-man.[7] Ayer wrote an article in 1988, 'What I saw when I was dead.'[8] In 2001 Dr. Jeremy George, the attending physician, told William Cash, who had written a play about Ayer, that Ayer had confided to him: 'I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my books and opinions.'[9]

Ayer was married twice. One wife was Vanessa Salmon (1936-1985), mother of Nigella Lawson.

Works

Ayer is perhaps best known for popularising the verification principle, in particular through his presentation of it in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). The principle was at the time at the heart of the debates of the so-called Vienna Circle which Ayer visited as a young guest, and others including the leading light of the circle, Moritz Schlick were already offering their own papers on the issue.[10] Ayer's own rather convoluted formulation was that a sentence can only be meaningful if it has verifiable empirical import, otherwise it is either 'analytical' if tautologous, or 'metaphysical' (i.e. meaningless, or 'literally senseless'). He started work on the book at the age of 23[11] and it was published when he was 26. Ayer's philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by those of the Vienna Circle and David Hume. His clear, vibrant and polemical exposition of them makes Language, Truth and Logic essential reading on the tenets of logical empiricism -- the book is regarded as a classic of 20th century analytic philosophy, and is widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In it, Ayer also proposed that the distinction between a conscious man and an unconscious machine resolves itself into a distinction between 'different types of perceptible behaviour',[12] an argument which anticipates the Turing test published in 1950 to test a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence (consciousness).

Ayer wrote two books on the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy of David Hume and a short biography of Voltaire.

In 1972-73 Ayer gave the Gifford Lectures at University of St Andrews, later published as The Central Questions of Philosophy. He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called 'philosophy' - including the whole of metaphysics, theology and aesthetics - were not matters that could be judged as being true or false and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them. Unsurprisingly, this made him unpopular with several other philosophy departments in Britain and his name is still reviled by many British professors to this day.

In 'The Concept of a Person and Other Essays' (1963), Ayer made several striking criticisms of Wittgenstein's private language theory.

Ayer's sense-data theory in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow Oxonian J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of common language philosophy. Ayer responded to this in the essay 'Has Austin Refuted the Sense-data Theory?', which can be found in his Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ Hilary Spurling (2000-12-24). 'The Wickedest Man in Oxford', The New York Times. Retrieved on 1 February 2008. 
  2. ^ He believed that religious language was unverifiable and as such literally nonsense. Consequently 'There is no God' was for Ayer as meaningless and metaphysical an utterance as 'God exists.' Though Ayer could not give assent to the declaration 'There is no God,' he was an atheist in the sense that he withheld assent from affirmation's of God's existence. However, in 'Language, Truth and Logic' he distinguishes himself from both agnostics and atheists by saying that both these stances take the statement 'God exists' as a meaningful hypothesis, which Ayer himself does not. That stance of a person who believes 'God' denotes no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as igtheism (defined in Paul Kurtz, The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge, ISBN 0-87975-766-3, page 194)
  3. ^ [1]Art-Historical Notes: 'Where are the Hirsts of the 1930s now?' The Independent, Nov 13, 1998 by David Buckman
  4. ^ [2] Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain by Stefan Collini Oxford University Press, 2006 ISBN 0199291055, 9780199291052
  5. ^ Rogers (1999), page 344.
  6. ^ http://www.near-death.com/experiences/atheists01.html
  7. ^ http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett06/dennett06_index.html
  8. ^ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n20_v40/ai_6701958
  9. ^ http://www.gonsalves.org/favorite/atheist.htm
  10. ^ Unanswerable Questions
  11. ^ page ix, 'Language, Truth and Logic', Penguin, 2001
  12. ^ page 140, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin, 2001

Further reading

Selected publications

External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alfred Jules Ayer
Retrieved from 'http://en.wikipedia.org/Alfred_Jules_Ayer'

Article is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from Wikipedia.org Original article is here.


Alfred_Jules_Ayer  Alfred_Jules_Ayer - Live Search Notizie

Risultati della ricerca


Yahoo! News Search Results for Alfred_Jules_Ayer


Alfred_Jules_Ayer  Live Search: Alfred_Jules_Ayer

Risultati della ricerca

Alfred Jules AyerBreve scheda biografica sul filosofo londinese.
Alfred Jules Ayer - WikiquoteÈ vietato inserire nuove citazioni nella sezione « Senza fonte ». Ogni aggiunta illecita sarà annullata. Nuove citazioni devono essere sempre accompagnate dall' indicazione ...
Alfred Jules Ayer - WikipediaAlfred Jules Ayer - meglio conosciuto come A. J. Ayer (9 ottobre   1910 –  27 giugno   1989) è stato un filosofo britannico, conosciuto per la sua promozione del positivismo ...
Alfred Jules Ayer - WikivitnunÞegar við snúum okkur að greiningu á sannleikanum, þá sjáum við að í öllum setningum á forminu ‚p er sönn‘ er orðasambandið ‚er sönn‘ rökfræðilega ...
Alfred Jules Ayer: La funzione "emotiva" dei simboli eticiLa presenza del simbolo etico nella proposizione non aggiunge nulla al suo contenuto fattuale. Così, per esempio, se dico a qualcuno: "Hai agito male rubando quel denaro ...
Alfred Jules Ayer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia Free
Alfred Jules Ayer - Wikipedia, frjálsa alfræðiritiðSir Alfred Jules Ayer (29. október 1910 – 27. júní 1989), betur þekktur sem A. J. Ayer (kallaður Freddie af vinum sínum), var breskur heimspekingur.
Alfred Jules Ayer - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libreSir Alfred Jules Ayer (Londres, 29 de octubre de 1910 - ibid., 27 de junio de 1989). Pedagogo y filósofo británico, padre del positivismo lógico.
Alfred Jules Ayer – WikipediaAlfred Jules Ayer (* 29. Oktober 1910; † 27. Juni 1989) trug wesentlich zur Popularisierung des Logischen Empirismus in englischsprachigen Ländern vor allem durch seine ...
Alfred Ayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaFull name: Alfred Jules Ayer: Birth: October 29, 1910 (1910-10-29) Death: June 27, 1989 (aged 78) School/tradition: Analytic: Main interests: Language, Epistemology, Ethics, Meaning, Science

http://www.napoli-pizza.net/ @CallCenter