Sir A. J. Ayer | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-10-29)29 October 1910 St. John's Wood, London, England |
| Died | 27 June 1989(1989-06-27) (aged 78) London, England |
| Awards | Knight Bachelor (1970) |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Christ Church, Oxford |
| Academic advisor | Gilbert Ryle[1] |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Institutions |
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| Main interests | |
| Notable ideas | |
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie"AyerFBA (/ɛər/AIR;[2] 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989)[3] was an English philosopher known for his promotion oflogical positivism, particularly in his booksLanguage, Truth, and Logic (1936) andThe Problem of Knowledge (1956).
Ayer was educated atEton College and theUniversity of Oxford, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at theUniversity of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy atChrist Church, Oxford.[4]
During theSecond World War Ayer was aSpecial Operations Executive andMI6 agent.[5]
Ayer wasGrote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic atUniversity College London from 1946 until 1959, after which he returned to Oxford to becomeWykeham Professor of Logic atNew College.[1] He was president of theAristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 andknighted in 1970. He was known for his advocacy ofhumanism, and was the second president of theBritish Humanist Association (now known as Humanists UK).
Ayer was president of theHomosexual Law Reform Society for a time; he remarked, "as a notorious heterosexual I could never be accused of feathering my own nest."
Ayer was born inSt John's Wood, in north west London, to Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer and Reine (née Citroen), wealthy parents fromcontinental Europe. His mother was from theDutch-Jewish family that founded theCitroën car company in France; his father was a SwissCalvinist financier who worked for theRothschild family, including for their bank and as secretary toAlfred Rothschild.[6][7][8]
Ayer was educated atAscham St Vincent's School, a former boardingpreparatory school for boys in the seaside town ofEastbourne inSussex, where he started boarding at the relatively early age of seven for reasons to do with theFirst World War, and atEton College, where he was aKing's Scholar. At Eton, Ayer first became known for his characteristic bravado and precocity. Though primarily interested in his intellectual pursuits, he was very keen on sports, particularly rugby, and reputedly played theEton Wall Game very well.[9] In the final examinations at Eton, Ayer came second in his year, and first in classics. In his final year, as a member of Eton's senior council, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the abolition ofcorporal punishment at the school. He won a classics scholarship toChrist Church, Oxford. He graduated with aBA withfirst-class honours.
After graduating from Oxford, Ayer spent a year in Vienna, returned to England and published his first book,Language, Truth and Logic, in 1936. This first exposition in English oflogical positivism as newly developed by theVienna Circle, made Ayer at age 26 theenfant terrible of British philosophy. As a newly famous intellectual, he played a prominent role in theOxford by-election campaign of 1938.[10] Ayer campaigned first for the Labour candidatePatrick Gordon Walker, and then for the joint Labour-Liberal "Independent Progressive" candidateSandie Lindsay, who ran on an anti-appeasement platform against the Conservative candidate,Quintin Hogg, who ran as the appeasement candidate.[10] The by-election, held on 27 October 1938, was quite close, with Hogg winning narrowly.[10]
In the Second World War, Ayer served as an officer in the Welsh Guards, chiefly in intelligence (Special Operations Executive (SOE) andMI6[11]). He was commissioned as asecond lieutenant into theWelsh Guards from the Officer Cadet Training Unit on 21 September 1940.[12]
After the war, Ayer briefly returned to theUniversity of Oxford where he became a fellow andDean of Wadham College. He then taught philosophy atUniversity College London from 1946 until 1959, during which time he started to appear on radio and television. He was an extrovert and social mixer who liked dancing and attending clubs in London and New York. He was also obsessed with sport: he had played rugby for Eton, and was a noted cricketer and a keen supporter ofTottenham Hotspur football team, where he was for many years a season ticket holder.[13] For an academic, Ayer was an unusually well-connected figure in his time, with close links to 'high society' and the establishment. Presiding over Oxfordhigh-tables, he is often described as charming, but could also be intimidating.[14]
Ayer was married four times to three women.[15] His first marriage was from 1932 to 1941, to (Grace Isabel) Renée, with whom he had a son – allegedly the son of Ayer's friend and colleagueStuart Hampshire[16] – and a daughter.[8] Renée subsequently married Hampshire.[15] In 1960, Ayer marriedAlberta Constance (Dee) Wells, with whom he had one son.[15] That marriage was dissolved in 1983, and the same year, Ayer married Vanessa Salmon, the former wife of politicianNigel Lawson. She died in 1985, and in 1989 Ayer remarried Wells, who survived him.[15] He also had a daughter with Hollywood columnistSheilah Graham Westbrook.[15]
In 1950, Ayer attended the founding meeting of theCongress for Cultural Freedom in West Berlin, though he later said he went only because of the offer of a "free trip".[17] He gave a speech on whyJohn Stuart Mill's conceptions of liberty and freedom were still valid in the 20th century.[17] Together with the historianHugh Trevor-Roper, Ayer fought againstArthur Koestler andFranz Borkenau, arguing that they were far too dogmatic and extreme in their anti-communism, in fact proposing illiberal measures in the defence of liberty.[18] Adding to the tension was the location of the congress inWest Berlin, together with the fact that theKorean War began on 25 June 1950, the fourth day of the congress, giving a feeling that the world was on the brink of war.[18]
From 1959 to his retirement in 1978, Ayer held the Wykeham Chair, Professor of Logic at Oxford. He was knighted in 1970. After his retirement, Ayer taught or lectured several times in the United States, including as a visiting professor atBard College in 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designerFernando Sanchez, Ayer confrontedMike Tyson, who was forcing himself upon the then little-known modelNaomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, Tyson reportedly asked, "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm theheavyweight champion of the world", to which Ayer replied, "And I am the formerWykeham 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, allowing Campbell to slip out.[19] Gully Wells, Ayer's stepdaughter via Dee Wells, records the same event with some slight variation of detail.[20]
Ayer was also involved in politics, including anti-Vietnam Waractivism, supporting the Labour Party (and later theSocial Democratic Party), chairing the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Sport, and serving as president of theHomosexual Law Reform Society.[1]
In 1988, a year before his death, Ayer wrote an article titled "What I saw when I was dead", describing an unusualnear-death experience after his heart stopped for four minutes as he choked on smoked salmon.[21] Of the experience, he 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."[22] A few weeks 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".[23]
Ayer died on 27 June 1989. From 1980 to 1989 he lived at 51York Street,Marylebone, where a memorial plaque was unveiled on 19 November 1995.[24]
InLanguage, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer presents theverification principle as the only valid basis for philosophy. Unless logical or empirical verification is possible, statements like "God exists" or "charity is good" are not true or untrue but meaningless, and may thus be excluded or ignored. Religious language in particular is unverifiable and as such literally nonsense. He also criticisesC. A. Mace's opinion[25] thatmetaphysics is a form ofintellectualpoetry.[26] The stance that a belief in God denotes no verifiablehypothesis is sometimes referred to asigtheism (for example, byPaul Kurtz).[27] In later years, Ayer reiterated that he did not believe in God[28] and began to call himself anatheist.[29] He followed in the footsteps ofBertrand Russell by debating religion with the Jesuit scholarFrederick Copleston.
Ayer's version ofemotivism divides "the ordinary system of ethics" into four classes:
He focuses on propositions of the first class – moral judgements – saying that those of the second class belong to science, those of the third are mere commands, and those of the fourth (which are considerednormative ethics as opposed tometa-ethics) are too concrete for ethical philosophy.
Ayer argues that moral judgements cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees withethical intuitionists. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition of non-empirical moral truths as "worthless"[30] since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":
The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money' I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, 'You stole that money.' In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, 'You stole that money,' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. ... If now I generalise my previous statement and say, 'Stealing money is wrong,' I produce a sentence that has no factual meaning – that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false. ... I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments.
— A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Ch. VI. "Critique of Ethics and Theology"
Between 1945 and 1947, together with Russell andGeorge Orwell, Ayer contributed a series of articles toPolemic, a short-lived BritishMagazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics edited by the ex-CommunistHumphrey Slater.[31][32]
Ayer was closely associated with the Britishhumanist movement. He was an Honorary Associate of theRationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.[33] In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostics' Adoption Society and in the same year succeededJulian Huxley as president of theBritish Humanist Association, a post he held until 1970. In 1968 he editedThe Humanist Outlook, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism. He was one of the signers of theHumanist Manifesto.[34]
Ayer is best known for popularising theverification principle, in particular through his presentation of it inLanguage, Truth, and Logic. The principle was at the time at the heart of the debates of the so-calledVienna Circle, which Ayer had visited as a young guest. Others, including the circle's leading light,Moritz Schlick, were already writing papers on the issue.[35] Ayer's formulation was that a sentence can be meaningful only if it has verifiableempirical import; otherwise, it is either "analytical" iftautologous or "metaphysical" (i.e. meaningless, or "literally senseless"). He started to work on the book at the age of 23[36] and it was published when he was 26. Ayer's philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by those of the Vienna Circle andDavid Hume. His clear, vibrant and polemical exposition of them makesLanguage, Truth and Logic essential reading on the tenets oflogical empiricism; the book is regarded as a classic of 20th-centuryanalytic philosophy and is widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In it, Ayer also proposes that the distinction between a conscious man and an unconscious machine resolves itself into a distinction between "different types of perceptible behaviour",[37] an argument that anticipates theTuring test published in 1950 to test a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence.
Ayer wrote two books on the philosopherBertrand Russell,Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971)[38] andRussell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy ofDavid Hume and a short biography ofVoltaire.
Ayer was a strong critic of the German philosopherMartin Heidegger. As a logical positivist, Ayer was in conflict with Heidegger's vast, overarching theories of existence. Ayer considered them completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis, and this sort of philosophy an unfortunate strain in modern thought. He considered Heidegger the worst example of such philosophy, which Ayer believed entirely useless. InPhilosophy in the Twentieth Century, Ayer accuses Heidegger of "surprising ignorance" or "unscrupulous distortion" and "what can fairly be described as charlatanism".[39]
In 1972–73, Ayer gave theGifford Lectures at theUniversity of St Andrews, later published asThe Central Questions of Philosophy. In the book's preface, he defends his selection to hold the lectureship on the basis that Lord Gifford wished to promote "natural theology, in the widest sense of that term", and that non-believers are allowed to give the lectures if they are "able reverent men, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth".[40] He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called philosophy—includingmetaphysics, theology andaesthetics—were not matters that could be judged true or false, and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them.
InThe Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963), Ayer heavily criticisedWittgenstein'sprivate language argument.
Ayer's sense-data theory inFoundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow OxonianJ. L. Austin inSense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of ordinary language philosophy. Ayer responded in the essay "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-datum Theory?",[41] which can be found in hisMetaphysics and Common Sense (1969).
Ayer was awarded a knighthood asKnight Bachelor in the London Gazette on 1 January 1970.[42]
Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, deposited 7 boxes of research material accumulated through the writing process atUniversity College London in 2007.[43] The material was donated in collaboration with Ayer's family.[43]
*For more complete publication details see"The Philosophical Works of A. J. Ayer" (1979) and"Bibliography of the writings of A.J. Ayer" (1992).
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic 1944–1959 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Wykeham Professor of Logic 1959–1978 | Succeeded by |
| Professional and academic associations | ||
| Preceded by | President of theAristotelian Society 1951–1952 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | President of theBritish Humanist Association 1966–1969 | Succeeded by |
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