Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–1989)

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AYER, ALFRED JULES
(1910–1989)

Alfred Jules Ayer, the British philosopher, received his education at Eton, where he was a king's scholar, and at Christ Church, Oxford. After graduating in 1932, he spent some time at the University of Vienna familiarizing himself with the logical positivist movement, then little known among English-speaking philosophers. He returned to Oxford in 1933 as a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church and in 1935 became a research fellow of the college. Army service in World War II kept him from philosophy until 1945, when he went back to university teaching as fellow and dean of Wadham College, Oxford. In the following year he became Grote professor of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College, London, where he remained until his return to Oxford as Wykeham professor of logic in 1959.

Ayer's first book, Language, Truth and Logic, was published in 1936. Its combination of lucidity, elegance, and vigor with an uncompromisingly revolutionary position has made it one of the most influential philosophical books of the century. As Ayer explains in the preface, the views he advocates derive from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein among modern philosophers and from the earlier empiricism of George Berkeley and David Hume and have much in common with the logical positivism of the Vienna circle. But he accepts none of these influences uncritically and clearly puts his own stamp on the position he outlines. He adopts Hume's division of genuine statements into logical and empirical, together with a principle of verification that requires that an empirical statement shall not be counted as meaningful unless some observation is relevant to its truth or falsity. This starting point has drastic and far-reaching results. Metaphysical statements, since they purport to express neither logical truths nor empirical hypotheses, must accordingly be reckoned to be without meaning. Theology is a special case of metaphysics; affirmations of divine existence are not even false, they are without sense. For the same reason, value statements in ethics or aesthetics fail to attain the status of genuine statements and are exposed as expressions of emotion with imperative overtones. The a priori statements of logic and mathematics are empty of factual content and are true in virtue of the conventions that govern the use of the words that compose them. The tasks left for philosophy after this withdrawal from its traditional boundaries are those of solving by clarification the problems left untouched by the advance of the sciences. Philosophy is an activity of analysis and is seen, in the end, to be identical with the logic of science.

The second edition of the book (1946) contains an introduction that modifies, though it does not retract, the main theses of the first edition. Ayer's attention here is directed chiefly to giving a precise formulation of the principle of verification. His original version is replaced by a much more elaborate and carefully worded formula. Both versions have, however, been shown to be faulty in admitting as meaningful metaphysical statements of precisely the kind that the principle is designed to outlaw. Indeed, there seems to be a weakness of the principle in that, it appears plausible only when its expression is left uncomfortably vague.

The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940) is concerned with two groups of problems, those of perception and those of "the ego-centric predicament" (privacy and publicity in language and in sense experience and the problem of other minds). The most interesting and original feature of the book is Ayer's treatment of the terminology of sense data as a language in which the problems of perception can be most appropriately dealt with rather than as a thesis embodying a discovery about the facts of sense experience. Thinking and Meaning (1947) was Ayer's inaugural lecture in the University of London. It is a trenchant application of Ockham's razor to the problems of intentionality and the relations between minds, thinking objects, words, and meaning. This short, powerful essay has so far received less than its due of critical attention. Philosophical Essays (1954) is a collection of papers ranging over philosophical logic, the theory of knowledge, and moral philosophy. Half the papers are carefully argued treatments of problems raised in Ayer's first two books; in particular, "The Analysis of Moral Judgements" is a moderate and persuasive restatement of the hints on ethics thrown out in Language, Truth and Logic.

In 1956 Ayer published The Problem of Knowledge, his most important book since his first was published in 1936. It is a sympathetic and constructive treatment of the various problems of philosophical skepticism. After a short discussion of philosophical method and the nature of knowledge, he discusses at length the pattern of skeptical arguments. He then examines three problems familiar from his earlier work—perception, memory, and other minds—as instances of skepticism at work. It may be that no statement is immune from doubt, but this does not entail that no statement can be known to be true. Where statements cannot, even in principle, be justified, we may conclude not that they are to be rejected but rather that no justification is called for.

The Concept of a Person (1963) is a collection of essays. The most striking, the one that gives the book its title, is a notable survey of some aspects of the problems of body, mind, and personal identity. The outcome can be roughly summarized as follows: To say that I own a mental state M is to say that there is a physical body B by which I am identified and that a state of B causes M.

Ayer's Shearman Lectures at the University of London in 1964 were on induction and probability. This was a new field of interest for Ayer, although it was foreshadowed in two papers in The Concept of a Person.

Ayer's work is very much of a piece, both in style and attitude. He became more catholic in interest and more cautious and temperate in expression than in his earlier writings. But his arguments were informed by the same principles and set out with the same grace and clarity. He leaned perhaps too heavily on Hume's dichotomy of statements into logical and factual, and he has not so far set himself seriously to meet contemporary criticisms (particularly those of W. V. O. Quine) that have been made of this famous distinction. This is at once a weakness of his present position and, perhaps, a presage of its future development.

Ayer died on June 29, 1989. He was professionally active virtually until the time of his death. In recognition of his accomplishments and public service, Ayer was Knighted in 1968. The following year he published both Metaphysics and Common Sense, a set of essays on diverse topics, and also The Origins of Pragmatism, an account of the philosophies of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. In 1970 Ayer presented the William James lectures at Harvard in which he discussed the thought of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. In that same year he gave the John Dewey lectures at Columbia University in which he revisited induction and probability, the topic of his 1964 Shearman lectures at the University of London. Ayer's The Central Questions of Philosophy (1974) is regarded by some as a new and refined version of his classic work Language, Truth and Logic. After serving for almost twenty years as Wykeham professor of logic at Oxford, Ayer retired from the position in 1978. Shortly thereafter a festschrift Perception and Identity was published in his honor, which contained essays by prominent thinkers and Ayer's replies to them. In 1982 Ayer offered his Philosophy in the Twentieth Century as a possible sequel to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. He published interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1985, Voltaire in 1986, and Thomas Paine in 1988. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes: Part of My Life (1977) and More of My Life (1984). His rather lengthy obituary in The Times of London concludes with these words: "Ayer was not a major philosopher like Russell or Wittgenstein, or even, perhaps like Popper and Ryle. But he was a very able philosopher indeed, endowed with particularly sparkling intellectual gifts, an admirable if slightly chilly prose style and unflagging energy. As a philosophical teacher and influence there is no one to compare with him since Russell and Moore."

Bibliography

works by ayer

Books

Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz, 1936; 2nd ed., 1946.

The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1940.

Thinking and Meaning. London: Athlone Press, 1947.

Philosophical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1954.

The Problem of Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1956.

The Concept of a Person. London: Macmillan, 1963.

The Origins of Pragmatism. London: Macmillan, 1968.

Metaphysics and Common Sense. London: Macmillan, 1969.

Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage. London: Macmillan, 1971.

Probability and Evidence. London: Macmillan, 1972.

Bertrand Russell. London: Fontana, 1972.

The Central Questions of Philosophy. London: Weidenfeld, 1973.

Part of My Life. London: Collins, 1977.

Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. London: Weidenfeld, 1982.

Freedom and Morality and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

More of My Life. London: Collins, 1984.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. London: Penguin, 1986.

Articles and Symposium Pieces

"Jean-Paul Sartre." Horizon (1945).

"Albert Camus." Horizon (1945).

"Some Aspects of Existentialism." Rationalist Annual (1948).

"Logical Positivism—A Debate." Delivered on the BBC June 13, 1949. The participants were Ayer and F. C. Copleston. Published in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, edited by P. Edwards and A. Pap (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957).

"Professor Malcolm on Dreaming." Journal of Philosophy (1960): 517–535. Malcolm's reply, with Ayer's rejoinder, Journal of Philosophy (1961), 294–299.

works on ayer

For critical discussion of Ayer, see John Wisdom, "Note on the New Edition of Professor Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic," Mind 57 (228) (1948): 401–419, reprinted in Wisdom's Philosophy and Psycho-analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953); H. H. Price, "Critical Notice of A. J. Ayer's The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge," Mind 50 (199) (1941): 280–293; H. H. Price, "Discussion: Professor Ayer's Essays," Philosophical Quarterly (1955); D. J. O'Connor, "Some Consequences of Professor A. J. Ayer's Verification Principle," Analysis (1949–1950); W. V. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); M. Lazerowitz, "Strong and Weak Verification I," Mind (1939) and "Strong and Weak Verification II," Mind (1950), reprinted in Lazerowitz's The Structure of Metaphysics (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955).