A. J. Ayer

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Name: Alfred Jules Ayer
Birth: October 29, 1910
Death: June 27, 1989
School/tradition: Analytic
Main interests
Language, Epistemology, Ethics, Meaning
Notable ideas
Logical positivism, verification principle, emotivist ethics
Influences	Influenced
Hume, Vienna Circle, Popper, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kant	R. M. Hare, Strawson

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (October 29, 1910 – June 27, 1989), better known as A. J. Ayer (or "Freddie" by his 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 the University College London from 1946 until 1959, when he became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He was knighted in 1970.

Life of Ayer

Ayer was born in London. His mother, Reine, came from Dutch Jews, and his father, Jules Louis Cypress Ayer, came from Swiss Calvinists. Young Ayer was precocious. From age seven he was sent to boarding school, and when he was 13 he won a scholarship to Eaton, where he was known as being both highly intelligent and highly competitive. But he felt himself an “outsider” there, and that feeling remained with him throughout his life. This feeling apparently came about partly from his Jewish heritage and partly from his atheism; at Eton he attempted to convert his fellow students to atheism. At sixteen he began reading and was highly impressed by Bertrand Russell’s Sceptical Essays and G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. From Russell he adopted the view that it is wrong to believe a proposition to be true when there is no grounds for believing in its truth.

In 1928 he traveled to Paris where he met Renee Lees, whom he married in 1933. In 1929 he won a classics scholarship to Christ Church College of Oxford University. There he studied Greek and philosophy. One of his tutors was Gilbert Ryle, who suggested that he read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This work caused Ayer to travel to Vienna in 1933 to meet with Moritz Schlick, the leader, and other members of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Along with W.V.O. Quine, Ayer was one of only two English-speaking people to meet and study with the Vienna Circle. Ayer’s German was not good, but it was sufficient for him to grasp the main points of logical positivism.

In 1935 Ayer was elected to a five-year research fellowship at Christ Church. That was also the year he finished writing Language, Truth, and Logic. While at Christ Church he refined his thought and had meetings with Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and J.L. Austin; he would have a long running controversy with Austin until Austin’s death. During this time he produced the book, Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. Also during this time his marriage to Renee began to disintegrate and Renee began an enduring relationship with Stuart Hampshire.

Ayer became strongly involved in politics in the pre WWII years, supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He considered joining the Commnist Party, but became instead an active member of the British Labour party. He joined the Welsh Guards when WWII broke out and worked for a time interrogating prisoners. He was then sent to America on a secret service mission having to do with gaining information about Fascist sympathizers in America. While in New York he reviewed films for the Nation, and also maintained an active social life; he fathered a daughter with Sheila Graham and made a recording with Lauren Bacall. After returning to England he worked in organizing the French resistance in London, and then was sent to Paris; while there he studied French existentialism and wrote articles on Sartre and Camus.

After his army service he was a tutorial fellow for a short time at Wadham College, Oxford, and then became the Grote Professor of Philosophy at University College of the University of London, where he appointed Hampshire (whom Ayer had cited as co-respondent in his divorce form Renee) and Richard Wollheim to lectureships. During Ayer's time there University College grew and became a strong center of philosophy. Ayer also became involved in radio broadcasts, including discussions with the scientists Zuckerman, Huxley, and Medawar; he also held a well-known radio debate with the Jesuit historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston on logical positivism and the meaning of religious language. (Bertrand Russell also had a famous radio debate with Copleston on the existence of God.)

In 1948 C.E.M Joad published an article that argued that Language, Truth, and Logic was responsible for creating an environment that favored Fascism, and Time magazine published an article attacking him. For his part, Ayer embarked on a several years long lecture tour that took him to France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil; this tour took place in the early '50s.

In 1958 Ayer became the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. He took the position in part, he claimed, to combat the strong influence of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy professor John L. Austin, who attacked Ayer’s views on perception; Austin died soon after (on February 8, 1960, at the age of 59). Ayer spent weekdays in Oxford and weekends in London with his second wife, Dee Wells. He continued to travel, including to China, Russia, India, and Pakistan. In 1963 he and Dee Wells had a son, Nicholas, whom Ayer loved dearly. But in Oxford he had a relationship with Vanessa Lawson. During the time from 1968 to 1983 he was also extremely productive philosophically, publishing a number of books (at least 4 of them) and giving the William James lectures at Harvard (1970), the Dewey Lectures at Columbia (also 1970), the Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, the Gilbert Ryle lectures at Trent University in Canada (1979) and the Whidden lectures at McMaster (also in Canada, 1983).

Ayer married Vanessa Lawson in 1982, shortly after being divorced from Dee Wells. Renee, his first wife, had died in 1980, followed by the death of their daughter, Valerie, in 1981. But Vanessa too died in 1985, leaving Ayer grief-stricken. This led to his remarrying Dee Wells, who comforted him in his grief and his old age.

Ayer himself had a near death experience lasting for some four minutes while his heart stopped in his hospital bed after he choked on a piece of smoked salmon. Ever after there has been a continuing controversy about whether Ayer’s experience during that episode converted him from lifelong atheism and unbelief in an afterlife to the opposite view – Ayer himself denying this publicly, but his doctor and others averring that Ayer had given private indications otherwise. In any case, Ayer’s wife said that Ayer’s personality and behavior changed from this; she is reported as having said, “Freddy has been so much nicer since he died.”

In addition to his philosophical work and his numerous marriages, Ayer had many affairs and many liaisons and a very active social life. He was a good dancer, and is supposed to have once said that he would have preferred being a dancer to a professional philosopher, but gave up that idea when he realized he would never be as good as Fred Astaire. His circle of acquaintances included W.H. Auden, Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Cyril Connolly, Richard Crossman, ee cummings and his wife Marianne, Jane Fontaine, Michael Foot, Hugh Gaitskell, Graham Greene, Christopher Hitchens, Roy Jenkins, Somerset Maugham, Jonathan Miller, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell, V.S. Pritchett, Stephen Spender, Philip Toynbee, Angus Wilson, and many others. The character George Moore in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers may have been modeled on him. It is said of Ayer that “he was a vain man whose vanity was part of his considerable charm.”

Ayer served as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. According to a published account, at a party that year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was harassing the 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". Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.

Among many other honors, Ayer was made a Fellow of the British Academy, an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, A Member of the Bulgarian Order of Cyril and Methodius, and Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur (of France).

Ayer entered the hospital with a collapsed lung in the early summer of 1989 and died on the 27th of June.

Language, Truth, and Logic

Ayer continued in the line of British empiricism that began with Locke and Hume and that had reached its pre-Ayer zenith with Russell. Ayer’rejected the possibility of any synthetic a priori knowledge, holding (with other empiricists) that all knowledge is either analytic a priori or synthetic a posteriori. Mathematical and logical truths or facts, according to this view, are tautologies; they do not give us any synthetic information about the world.

While a student at Oxford Ayer read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and was much impressed with it. In 1933 Ayer traveled to Vienna to meet and study with the members of the Vienna Circle. The result was Ayer’s first book, begun when he was only 24 and published when he was 26, Language, Truth, and Logic. After its publication this small book became the most studied and probably most influential treatise in philosophy in the Anglo-American world up to sometime in the 1950s. As Ayer himself noted in the Introduction to the second edition (1946) it was “in every sense a young man’s book,” and “much of its argument would have been more persuasive if it had not been presented in so harsh a form.” The book presents a summary of and strong argument for logical positivism. In that sense it can be called the gospel tract of logical positivism, or logical empiricism as Ayer preferred to call it.

Chapter one deals with the elimination of metaphysics and the adoption of verifiability “as a criterion for testing the significance of putative statements of fact.” Although no proposition can be conclusively verified, “For a statement of fact to be genuine some possible observations must be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood.” Metaphysical sentences, defined as sentences which express neither tautologies (i.e. logic or mathematics) nor empirical hypotheses, are to be regarded as meaningless.

Chapter two deals with the function of philosophy. Philosophy, according to Ayer, is not a search for first principles. Instead, its function is wholly critical analysis, and it is wholly independent of metaphysics. “The philosopher as analyst is not concerned with the physical properties of things, but only with the way in which we speak about them.”

Chapter three is concerned with the nature of philosophical analysis. Philosophy gives not explicit definitions, but definitions in use. According to Ayer, “Material things are logical constructions out of sense-contents.” This solves, Ayer held, “the so-called problem of perception.” And “The propositions of philosophy are not empirical propositions…” but “are concerned with the logical consequences of linguistic conventions.”

Chapter four presents Ayer’s rejection of any synthetic a priori. “As empiricists,” he says, “we must deny that any general proposition concerning a matter of fact can be known with certainty to be valid.” The propositions of logic and mathematics are not inductive generalizations, as J.S. Mill had claimed, but are instead “necessarily true because they are analytic.” Moreover, “Analytic propositions are tautological; they say nothing concerning any mater of fact. But they give us new knowledge, inasmuch as they bring to light the implications of our linguistic usages.”

In chapter five Ayer asserts that “The words ‘true’ and ‘false’ function in the sentence simply as assertion or negation signs.” “No empirical propositions are certain, not even those which refer to immediate experience.” And “Observation confirms or discredits not just a single hypothesis but a system of hypotheses.”

Chapter six takes up the issues of ethics and theology. Assertions of value, Ayer claims, are not scientific, but are “emotive.” Thus they are neither true nor false. “They are partly expressions of feeling, partly commands.” The same applies to aesthetics. Concerning theology, it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of a transcendent god, or even showing it to be probable. So the assertion that a transcendent god exists is a metaphysical assertion, “and therefore not literally significant.”

Chapter seven is concerned with the self and the common world. There Ayer claims that the self should be analyzed in terms of sense experiences; that there are no a priori objections to the existence of epistemological and causal connections between minds and material things; that “a sense-experience cannot belong to the sense-history of more than one self,” that “the substantive ego is a fictitious metaphysical entity,” and that the claim “that the empirical self survives the dissolution of the body is a self-contradictory proposition.” He also denies that his view involves solipsism.

In the final eighth chapter Ayer dealt with his solutions to some outstanding philosophical disputes. He concludes with remarks on the relationship between philosophy and science; his view is that the philosopher must become a scientist “if he is to make any substantial contribution towards the growth of human knowledge” in that philosophy “must develop into the logic of science.”

In the second edition Ayer modified some of his positions to some extent. In particular, he wrote that he now considered it incorrect to say that there are no philosophical propositions. He also had come to believe that “there is a class of empirical propositions of which it is permissible to say that they can be verified conclusively.” He also dealt with and modified his handling of the problem of what he had earlier called “putative propositions” and propositions that “purport to express” something; with the fact that “most empirical propositions are in some degree vague,” and with his earlier claim that “philosophical analysis consisted mainly in the provision of ‘definitions in use.’”

Works

Ayer is perhaps best known for his verification principle, as presented in "Language, Truth, and Logic" (1936), according to which a sentence is meaningful only if it has verifiable empirical import. He started work on the book at the age of 24 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 positivism — the book is regarded as a classic of 20th century philosophy, and is widely read in philosophy courses around the world.

In some ways, Ayer was the philosophical successor to Bertrand Russell, and he wrote two books on the philosopher: Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy of David Hume.

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 this country 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 1950's work of common language philosophy. Ayer responded to this in the essay "Has Austin Refuted Sense-data Theory?", which can be found in his Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).

Bibliography

Publications by Ayer

• 1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz. (2nd. Edition, 1946.)
• 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
• 1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on freedom, phenomenalism, basic propositions, utilitarianism, other minds, the past, ontology.)
• 1957, “The conception of probability as a logical relation”, in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
• 1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
• 1963, The Concept of a Person and other Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on truth, privacy and private languages, laws of nature, the concept of a person, probability.)
• 1967, “Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Data Theory?” Synthese vol. Xviii, pp. 117-40. (Reprinted in Ayer 1969).
• 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan.
• 1969, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London: Macmillan. (Essays on knowledge, man as a subject for science, chance, philosophy and politics, existentialism, metaphysics, and a reply to Austin on sense-data theory.)
• 1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan.
• 1972a, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan.
• 1972b, Bertrand Russell, London: Fontana.
• 1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld.
• 1979, “Replies”, in G. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity, London: Macmillan.
• 1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld.
• 1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin.
• 1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins.
• 1984, More of My Life, London: Collins.

Works about Ayer

There is a vast literature on Ayer, logical positivism, ethical emotivism, and other topics covered by Ayer. Here are some of those works:

• Altham, J., 1986, “The Legacy of Emotivism”, in Macdonald and Wright, 1986.
• Austin, J.L., 1962, Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Blackburn, S., 1984, Spreading the Word, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Blackburn, S.,1998, Ruling Passions, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Chalmers, D., 2004, “Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics” in Philosophical Studies, vol.118, nos. 1-2, pp. 153-226.
• Church, A., 1949, “Review of Language, Truth, and Logic”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 14: 52-3.
• Dreier, James, 2004, “Meta-ethics and the problem of Creeping Minimalism”, in Hawthorne 2004.
• Foster J., 1985, A.J. Ayer, London: Routledge.
• Gettier, E.L., 1963, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” in Analysis vol. 23, no.6.
• Gibbard, A., 1990, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Griffiths, A.P., 1991, A.J. Ayer Memorial Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hahn, L.E., 1992, The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer, Open Court.
• Hanfling, O., 1999, Ayer, London: Routledge.
• Hawthorne, John, ed., 2004, Ethics, Volume 18, Philosophical Perspectives series, Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Honderich,Ted, Ayer's Philosophy and its Greatness.
• Honderich, T., 1991, Essays on A.J. Ayer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Jackson, F., 1998, From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lewis, D.K., 1988, “Statements Partly About Observation”, Philosophical Papers 17: 1-31.
• Macdonald, G.F., 1979, Perception and Identity, London: Macmillan.
• Macdonald, Graham, Alfred Jules Ayer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 7, 2005.
• Macdonald, Graham. and Wright, C., 1986, Fact, Science, and Morality, Oxford: Blackwell.
• Mackie, J.L., 1977, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Martin, R., 2000, On Ayer, Wadsworth Publishing Co.
• Anthony Quinton, Alfred Jules Ayer. Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (1996), pp. 255-282.
• Rogers, Ben, 1999, A.J. Ayer: A Life, London: Chatto & Windus.
• Rogers, Ben A.J. Ayer: A Life, Grove Press, 1999, ISBN 0802116736 (Chapter one and a review by Hilary Spurling, New York Times, December 24, 2000.)
• Smith, M., 1986, “Should We Believe in Emotivism”, in Macdonald and Wright, 1986.
• Stevenson, C.L., 1944, Ethics and Language, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. (The classic presentation of ethical emotivism.)
• Thau, M., 2004, “What is Disjunctivism?” in Philosophical Studies 120, pp. 193-253.
• Wilks, C., 2002, Emotion, Truth and Meaning, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht.
• Wright, C., 1986, “Scientific Realism, Observation, and the Verification Principle”, in Macdonald and Wright, 1986.
• Wright, C., 1989, “The Verification Principle: Another Puncture - Another Patch”, Mind, 98: 611-22.

Other Internet Resources

• Looksmart: A.J. Ayer, a listing of resources on A.J. Ayer.
• The Condensed Edition of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, maintained by Glyn Hughes.
• EpistemeLinks.com: A.J. Ayer, a listing of resources on A.J. Ayer.
• The Brains Trust, by A.J. Ayer, maintained by Stephen Moss.

External links

• Article in Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
• A. J. Ayer at Philosophry

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• A. J. Ayer  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "A. J. Ayer"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.