Alfred Jules Ayer

Background

Alfred Jules Ayer was born in 1910. His mother, Reine Citroën, was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France. His father, Jules Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.

Education

He was educated at Eton and Oxford University. After his graduation from Oxford, he studied at the University of Vienna, concentrating on the philosophy of Logical Positivism.

Career

From 1933 to 1940 he was lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church (College), Oxford. During World War II he served in the Welsh Guards and was also engaged in military intelligence. In 1945, he returned to Oxford where he became a fellow and Dean of Wadham College. In the following year, he became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London. In 1959, he returned to Oxford, where he became Wykeham Professor of Logic, a position he held until his retirement in 1978.

Ayer's books include: Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century (Contribution), 1967; British Empirical Philosophers (editor with Raymond Winch), (1952); The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973); The Concept of a Person (1963); The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940); Freedom and Morality and Other Essays (1984); Hume (1980); Language, Truth and Logic (1956); Logical Positivism (editor), (1960); Metaphysics and Common Sense (1970); The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (1968); Philosophical Essays (1954); Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982); Probability and Evidence (1972); The Problem of Knowledge (1956); The Revolution in Philosophy (Contribution), (1956); and Russell and Moore; The Analytical Heritage (1971).

Language, Truth and Logicis one of Ayer's most important books and may be considered as one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century. In the second edition (1946), Ayer clarified some of his ideas and replied to his critics, but essentially his philosophical position remained the same. He called his philosophy "logical empiricism, " a variation of logical positivism, the philosophical orientation he learned in Vienna. He was largely influenced by the thought of the 20th century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and by the earlier empiricism of George Berkeley and David Hume.

The book is a milestone in the development of philosophical thought in the 20th century. The implications of Ayer's "logical empiricism" would be felt by many branches of the discipline of philosophy, especially metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion, and also logic, mathematics, and the philosophy of science. Although Ayer acknowledged the influences upon his philosophical perspective, he remained an independent thinker, accepting no position uncritically.

In the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer provided an extended reworking of his notion of the verification principle. It was this principle which was chiefly criticized by the philosophical commentators. It would seem that the verification principle, as formulated by Ayer, is a kind of meaningless metaphysical statement that the verification principle itself was supposed to prohibit.

In his later works, Ayer proceeded boldly, and with wisdom and clarity, to deal with the major problems that have confronted and confounded other 20th century philosophers: such problems as perception, induction, knowledge, meaning, truth, value theory, other minds, the mind-body dichotomy, personal identity, and intention. Ayer was always an original and bold thinker who, in later life, espoused a more selective assessment of metaphysics due to the works of his trusted colleagues. His views on death, dying and the afterlife were slightly altered after briefly dying for four minutes and subsequently being revived.

His death on June 27, 1989 marked the end of the second golden age of British philosophy.

Achievements

• Alfred Jules Ayer is known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956).
  
  He was awarded a Knighthood as Knight Bachelor in the London Gazette on January 1, 1970. He was also a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. Among his many awards, Ayer received an honorary doctorate from Brussels University in 1962.

Works

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• book

  • Textes Cles De Metaethique: Connaissance Morale, Scepticismes Et Realismes (French Edition)

    (The new discipline of metaethics appeared as an answer to...)

  • Hume: A Very Short Introduction

    (Hume's "naturalist" approach to a wide variety of philoso...)

  • The Problem of Knowledge

    (In this book, the author of "Language, Truth and Logic" t...)

  • Thomas Paine

    ( "A lively discussion of the life and writings of one of...)

  • Language, Truth and Logic (Dover Books on Western Philosophy)
  • Probability and Evidence (Columbia Classics in Philosophy)

    (A. J. Ayer was one of the foremost analytical philosopher...)

  • Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
  • Philosophical Essays
  • Origins of Pragmatism

Religion

He said:

"I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it. "

"If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance. "

Views

Ayer asserted that the criterion of meaning is found in the "verification principle": "We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. " (Language, Truth and Logic). The a priori statements of logic and mathematics do not claim to provide factual content. Those statements can be said to be true only because of the conventions which govern the use of the symbols that make up the statements.

Ayer was known in the 20th century for his rigorous attack on metaphysics and as the main representative of the British empirical tradition. Genuine statements are either logical or empirical. Metaphysical statements do not purport to express either logical truths or empirical hypotheses. For that reason, metaphysical statements are pseudo-statements and do not have any meaning. The metaphysician had been tied to the attempt to construct a deductive system of the universe from "first principles. " These first principles, Ayer argued, can never be derived from experience. They are merely hypotheses. As a priori principles, they are hypotheses only, and therefore are tautologies and notcertain empirical knowledge.

Theology, as a special branch of metaphysics which attempts to gain knowledge that transcends the limits of experience (for example, the affirmation of the existence of God) is not only false but it too has no meaning. Value statements in ethics and aesthetics are also meaningless, not genuine statements, and can be understood as emotive utterances of an imperative character.

Ayer therefore discovered for philosophy a function in the 20th century. Once the traditional tasks of philosophy have been discarded, philosophy can be seen as an intellectual discipline which endeavors to clarify the problems of science. Philosophy is, therefore, finally identical with the logic of science.

In Language, Truth and Logic Ayer argued that it is the task of the philosopher to give a correct definition of material things in terms of sensation. The philosopher does not deal with the properties of things in the world, but only with the way we speak of them. The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character: " (Propositions) … do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the factual consequences of definitions. "

Quotations: "No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine. "

"But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science. "

"Even logical positivists are capable of love. "

"We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express. "

"The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs. "

Membership

He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1952 and honorary fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, in 1957. He was also an honorary member of the American Academy.

Interests

• Epistemology, philosophical logic

Connections

Ayer was married four times to three women. His first marriage was from 1932–1941 to (Grace Isabel) Renée (d. 1980), who subsequently married philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Ayer's friend and colleague. In 1960 he married Alberta Constance (Dee) Wells, with whom he had one son. Ayer's marriage to Wells was dissolved in 1983 and that same year he married Vanessa Salmon, former wife of politician Nigel Lawson. She died in 1985 and in 1989 he remarried Dee Wells, who survived him. Ayer also had a daughter with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham Westbrook.

Father:

Jules Ayer

He was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.

Mother:

Reine Citroën

She was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France.

Spouse:

Grace Isabel Renée

(d. 1980)

Spouse:

Vanessa Salmon

Spouse:

Dee Wells

Spouse:

Alberta Wells or Alberta Constance Wells

(19 March, 1925 – 24 June, 2003)

Daughter:

Sheilah Graham

(born Lily Shiel; 15 September 1904 – 17 November 1988)

References

• A. J. Ayer: A Life