About AJ Ayer: British Philosopher (1910-1989)
Sir Alfred Jules “Freddie Mac” Ayr FBA (; October 29, 1910 – June 27, 1989), commonly known as AJ Alwas an English philosopher best known for popularizing logical positivism, especially in his writings Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and knowledge problem (1956).
He was educated at Eton and Oxford, before studying the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he taught philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford University.
During World War II, Al was a special operations executive and MI6 agent.
From 1946 to 1959 he was the Groth Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, after which he returned to Oxford to become the Wickham Professor of Logic at the New College. He was President of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 and was knighted in 1970. Known for his advocacy of humanism, he was the second president of the British Humanist Society (now called the British Humanists).
Life
Al was born in St John’s Wood, North West London, to a wealthy family from continental Europe. His mother, Reine Citroën, came from a Dutch Jewish family and founded the Citroën Automobile Company in France. His father, Jules Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschilds.
Ayer was educated at Ascham St Vincent’s School, a former boys’ boarding prep school in the seaside town of Eastbourne, Sussex, where he started boarding at the age of seven due to the First World War, and Eton College, a boarding school at Eton College (near Windsor) in Berkshire. It was at Eton that Al first became known for his characteristic bravado and precocity. Although he was primarily interested in further intellectual pursuits, he was very keen on sports, especially rugby, and was said to have played well at Eton. In Eton’s final exams, Ayr finished second for the year and first in Classics. In his final year, as a member of the Eton High Council, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the abolition of corporal punishment at the school. He was awarded a Classics Fellowship from Christ Church, Oxford University.
After graduating from Oxford, Al spent a year in Vienna before returning to England to publish his first book, Language, Truth and Logic 1936. The first exposition of the newly developed logical positivist English of the Vienna School, which made the 26-year-old Ayr a “terrible child” of British philosophy. During World War II, he served as an officer in the Welsh Guard, primarily responsible for intelligence (Special Operations Executive (SOE) and MI6). On 21 September 1940, Ayr was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Welsh Guard from the Officer Cadet Training Unit.
After the war, he briefly returned to Oxford University as a Fellow and Dean of Wadham College. He thereafter taught philosophy at the University of London from 1946 to 1959, when he also began appearing on radio and television. He is an extroverted social hybrid who loves to dance and join clubs in London and New York. He’s also obsessed with sports: he played rugby for Eton and is a well-known cricketer and an avid supporter of the Tottenham Hotspur football team he has been a part of over the years season ticket holders. For an academic, Al was a very well-connected figure in his day, with strong ties to “high society” and the establishment. Hosting the Oxford High Table, he is often described as charming, but he can also be intimidating at times.
Al has been married four times to three women. His first marriage was from 1932 to 1941 to (Grace Isabel) Renée (d. 1980) who later married Ayer’s friend and colleague, philosopher Stuart Hampshire. In 1960, he married Constance (Dee) Wells, Alberta, with whom he had a son. Al’s marriage to Wells dissolved in 1983, the same year he married Vanessa Salmon, the ex-wife of politician Nigel Lawson. She died in 1985, and in 1989 he remarried Dee Wells, who survived. Al also had a daughter with Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham Westbrook.
From 1959 until his retirement in 1978, Sir Alfred was the Wickham Chair and Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He was knighted in 1970. After retirement, Ayer taught or lectured in the United States on several occasions, including a visiting professorship at Bard College in the fall of 1987. That same year, at a party hosted by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer’s then-77-year-old Mike Tyson confronted (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell . When Al asked Tyson to stop, the boxer reportedly asked, “Do you know who the fuck am I? I’m the world heavyweight champion,” Al replied, “and I’m a former Wickham Professor of Logic. We are all leaders in our field. I suggest we talk about this like rational people. Al and Tyson then start talking and Campbell slips out.
In 1988, the year before his death, Al wrote an essay titled “What I Saw When I Died,” describing an unusual near-death experience. Speaking of the experience, Al began by saying that it “slightly weakened my belief that my true death…will be my end, although I still hope it will be.” A few days later, however, he revised This statement, says “What I should say is that my experience has diminished, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my rigid attitude towards that belief”.
Al died on June 27, 1989. From 1980 to 1989, Al lived at 51 York Street, Marylebone, where a commemorative plaque was unveiled on November 19, 1995.
philosophical thought
exist Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer proposed the verification principle as the only valid basis for philosophy. Statements like “God exists” or “Charity is good” are not true or untrue, but rather meaningless, unless they can be verified logically or empirically, and may therefore be excluded or ignored. Especially religious language is unverifiable and therefore practically nonsense. He also criticized CA Mace’s view that metaphysics is a poetic form of knowledge. The position that belief in “God” signifies no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as atheism (eg, Paul Kurtz). In later years, Al reiterated that he did not believe in God and began calling himself an atheist. He followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell, debating the subject of religion with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston.
Al’s version of Emotionalism divides “ordinary moral systems” into four categories:
- “Propositions expressing definitions of ethical terms, or judgments about the legitimacy or likelihood of certain definitions”
- “Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience and their causes”
- “Advice on Moral Virtue”
- “Actual Moral Judgment”
He concentrates on propositions of the first category – moral judgments – saying that propositions of the second category belong to science, propositions of the third category are merely commands, and propositions of the fourth category (considered in normative ethics as opposed to meta-ethics ) is too specific for ethical philosophy.
Ayer argues that moral judgments cannot be translated into unethical, empirical terms and therefore cannot be verified. On this, he agrees with the ethical intuitionists. But he differs from the intuitionists in that he sees appeals to intuitions of non-empirical moral truths as “worthless” because one person’s intuition often contradicts another’s. Instead, Ayer concluded that the ethical concept was “just a pseudo-concept”:
The presence of ethical symbols in a proposition does not add to its factual content. So if I say to someone, “It was wrong that you stole that money,” I just say “you stole that money,” and I’m not stating more. Also, this behavior is wrong, and I won’t make any further statements about it. I’m just proving my moral objection to it. It’s as if I said “you stole that money” in a special horror tone or wrote it with some special exclamation mark. …if now I generalize my previous statement and say, “stealing money is wrong”, I produce a sentence that has no factual meaning – that is, the proposition expressed cannot be true or false. …I’m just expressing certain moral sentiments.
[Between1945and1947heworkedwithRussellandGeorgeOrwellfor[1945年至1947年間,他與羅素和喬治·奧威爾一起為controversythe short-lived British Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Aesthetics edited by former communist Humphrey Slater.
Ayr was closely associated with the British Humanist movement. From 1947 until his death, he was an honorary member of the Rationalist Press Association. In 1963, he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostic Adoption Society, and succeeded Julian Huxley as president of the British Humanist Society that same year. He persisted until 1970. In 1968, he edited humanistic view, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism. In addition, he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto.
work
Ayer is known for popularizing the proof-of-principle, especially through his work in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). The principle was at the heart of the debate at the so-called Vienna circle, which Ayer visited as a young guest. Others, including Moritz Schlick, the leader of the circle, have provided their own papers on the issue. Al’s own formulation is that a sentence is meaningful only if it has verifiable empirical meaning, otherwise it is either “analytical”, if synonymous, or “metaphysical” (i.e. meaningless, or “” literally meaningless”). He started writing the book at 23 and published it at 26. Eyre’s philosophical thought was deeply influenced by the Vienna School and David Hume.His clear, vibrant and controversial exposition of them makes Language, Truth and Logic Essential Reading for Logical Empiricism – Considered a classic of 20th century analytic philosophy, this book is widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In it, Ayer also proposes that the distinction between conscious humans and unconscious machines decomposes itself into a distinction between “different types of perceptible behavior”, an argument that foreshadowed the Turing Test published in 1950 , to test the machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligence.
Al wrote two books about the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Russell and Moore: Analyzing Legacy (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on David Hume’s philosophy and a short biography of Voltaire.
Eyre was a powerful critic of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. As a logical positivist, Eyre clashed with Heidegger’s broad, total theory of being. He felt completely unable to pass these…
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