A.J. Ayer

1910-1989 · British · Logical Positivism, Empiricist Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Philosophical Method

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A brilliant, dapper Old Etonian who would later be knighted and become a fixture of BBC philosophy broadcasts, A.J. Ayer made his name at twenty-six with a slim, audacious book that tried to demolish most of philosophy. Fresh from a 1932 visit to Vienna, where he had absorbed the doctrines of the Vienna Circle, he returned and rendered their hard-edged empiricism into elegant, combative English. The result, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), became one of the most influential philosophy books of the century.

Topics A.J. Ayer addresses

• the verification principle
• the elimination of metaphysics
• logical positivism
• emotivism
• the analytic/synthetic distinction
• pseudo-propositions
• literal meaning and cognitive content
• tautologies
• the rejection of synthetic a priori knowledge
• phenomenalism
• sense-data theory
• the construction of the physical world from sense-experience
• knowledge as having the right to be sure
• the problem of other minds
• the argument from analogy
• personal identity
• the Humean regularity theory of causation
• the rejection of necessary connection
• induction and probability
• free will and compatibilism
• the Vienna Circle
• emotivism in aesthetics
• the boo/hoorah theory
• the empiricist theory of meaning

Converse with A.J. Ayer on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in A.J. Ayer's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.