The great philosophers

Alfred Jules Ayer: Bringing philosophy into the 20th century

Alfred Jules Ayer’s belief in using logical positivism theory to determine the truth of a claim helped carry the tradition of British empiricism into the contemporary era

Tuesday 22 February 2022 21:30 GMT
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<p>His time with the Vienna Circle helped shape his ideas </p>

His time with the Vienna Circle helped shape his ideas

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89) was an empiricist philosopher in the British tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and did much to popularise logical positivism in the English-speaking world.

There’s an awful lot of universe out there to think about – pick a snail no one’s noticed and you’re off. It is not so easy to be an original philosopher. We’ve had nearly 2,500 years of thinking, undertaken by the brightest people imaginable, on about four questions. Good luck to anyone who dreams of effecting a philosophical paradigm shift. So it’s a little hard to take seriously the hiccoughs which accompany many treatments of AJ Ayer’s philosophy.

It is said that he was a brilliant but unoriginal thinker; he brought the views of others to the English-speaking world; he was a great synthesizer of the thoughts of others. You can be all of these things and still be one of the 20th-century’s greatest philosophers. If nothing else, he carried the tradition of British empiricism, a noble line stretching back to Locke, Berkeley and Hume, into the contemporary era. Perhaps this approach to Ayer’s philosophy is a cure for the hiccoughs. It’s the one adopted here.

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