Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer ( AIR; 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989) was an English philosopher who became professionally established through his exposition of major theses of logical positivism in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). The work's dismissal of metaphysics, and endorsement of emotivism was the cause of much controversy and debate.
Following his education at the University of Oxford, and a period of study and discussion with Moritz Schlick and the Vienna Circle over the winter of 1932 –1933, from 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy Christ Church, Oxford (his alma mater). After serving as a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent during the Second World War, Ayer soon after became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959. He returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, a chair he held until his retirement in 1977/1978. He was knighted in 1970.
Ayer was known for his advocacy of humanism, and was the second president of the (then) British Humanist Association 1965-1970. He was also president of the Homosexual Law Reform Society for a time; remarking that "as a notorious heterosexual I could never be accused of feathering my own nest".
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Life
Ayer was born in St John's Wood, in north west London, to Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer and Reine (née Citroen), both parents from continental Europe. His mother was from the Dutch-Jewish family that founded the Citroën car company in France; his father was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family, including for their bank and as secretary to Alfred Rothschild.
Ayer was educated at Ascham St Vincent's School, a former boarding preparatory school for boys in the seaside town of Eastbourne in Sussex, where he started boarding at the relatively early age of seven for reasons to do with the First World War, and at Eton College, where he was a King'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 the Eton Wall Game very well. 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 of corporal punishment at the school. He won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He graduated with a BA with first-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 of logical positivism as newly developed by the Vienna Circle, made Ayer at age 26 the enfant terrible of British philosophy. As a newly famous intellectual, he played a prominent role in the Oxford by-election campaign of 1938. Ayer campaigned first for the Labour candidate Patrick Gordon Walker, and then for the joint Labour-Liberal "Independent Progressive" candidate Sandie Lindsay, who ran on an anti-appeasement platform against the Conservative candidate, Quintin Hogg, who ran as the appeasement candidate. The by-election, held on 27 October 1938, was quite close, with Hogg winning narrowly.
In the Second World War, Ayer served as an officer in the Welsh Guards, chiefly in intelligence (Special Operations Executive (SOE) and MI6). He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Welsh Guards from the Officer Cadet Training Unit on 21 September 1940.
After the war, Ayer briefly returned to the University of Oxford where he became a fellow and Dean of Wadham College. He then taught philosophy at University 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 of Tottenham Hotspur football team, where he was for many years a season ticket holder. For an academic, Ayer was an unusually well-connected figure in his time, with close links to 'high society' and the establishment. Presiding over Oxford high-tables, he is often described as charming, but could also be intimidating.
Philosophical ideas
In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer presents the verification 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 criticises C. A. Mace's opinion that metaphysics is a form of intellectual poetry. The stance that a belief in God denotes no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as igtheism (for example, by Paul Kurtz). In later years, Ayer reiterated that he did not believe in God and began to call himself an atheist. He followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating religion with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston.
Ayer's version of emotivism divides "the ordinary system of ethics" into four classes:
"Propositions that express definitions of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions"
"Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes"
"Exhortations to moral virtue"
"Actual ethical judgements"
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 considered normative ethics as opposed to meta-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 with ethical intuitionists. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition of non-empirical moral truths as "worthless" since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":
Works
Ayer is best known for popularising the verification principle, in particular through his presentation of it in Language, Truth, and Logic. The principle was at the time at the heart of the debates of the so-called Vienna 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. Ayer's formulation was that a sentence can be meaningful only if it has verifiable empirical import; otherwise, it is either "analytical" if tautologous or "metaphysical" (i.e. meaningless, or "literally senseless"). He started to work on the book at the age of 23 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 empiricism; the book is regarded as a classic of 20th-century analytic 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", an argument that anticipates the Turing test published in 1950 to test a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence.
Ayer wrote two books on the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy of David Hume and a short biography of Voltaire.
Ayer was a strong critic of the German philosopher Martin 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. In Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Ayer accuses Heidegger of "surprising ignorance" or "unscrupulous distortion" and "what can fairly be described as charlatanism".
In 1972–73, Ayer gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews, later published as The 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". He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called philosophy—including metaphysics, theology and aesthetics—were not matters that could be judged true or false, and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them.
Awards
Ayer was awarded a knighthood as Knight Bachelor in the London Gazette on 1 January 1970.
Collections
Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, deposited 7 boxes of research material accumulated through the writing process at University College London in 2007. The material was donated in collaboration with Ayer's family.
Selected publications
1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz., 2nd ed., with new introduction (1946) OCLC 416788667 ISBN 978-0-14-118604-7
1936, "Causation and free will", The Aryan Path.
1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan. OCLC 2028651
1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on freedom, phenomenalism, basic propositions, utilitarianism, other minds, the past, ontology.) OCLC 186636305
1957, "The conception of probability as a logical relation", in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, New York: Dover Publications.
1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan. OCLC 557578816
1957, "Logical Positivism - A Debate" (with F. C. Copleston) in: Edwards, Paul, Pap, Arthur (eds.), A Modern Introduction to Philosophy; readings from classical and contemporary sources
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.) OCLC 3573935
1967, "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?" Synthese vol. XVIII, pp. 117–140. (Reprinted in Ayer 1969).
1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan. OCLC 641463982
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 [Ayer 1967].) ISBN 978-0-333-10517-7