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	A. J. Ayer

	
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		English philosopher




	Sir

A. J. Ayer

FBA

	
	Born	Alfred Jules Ayer

(1910-10-29)29 October 1910
London, England

	Died	27 June 1989(1989-06-27) (aged 78)
London, England

	Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
	
	Era	20th-century philosophy
	Region	Western philosophy
	School		Analytic philosophy
	logical positivism



	Institutions		Christ Church, Oxford
	Wadham College, Oxford
	University College, London
	New College, Oxford



	Academic advisors	Gilbert Ryle[1]
	Main interests
		Philosophy of language
	epistemology
	ethics
	theory of meaning
	philosophy of science



	Notable ideas
		Verification principle
	emotivist ethics



	
Influences

		David Hume
	Vienna Circle
	Karl Popper
	Bertrand Russell
	Ludwig Wittgenstein[2]
	Immanuel Kant
	Voltaire








	
Influenced

		R. M. Hare
	Peter Strawson
	Ted Honderich
	Mihailo Marković
	Peter Unger








	



Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer FBA (/ɛər/;[3] 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989),[4] usually cited as A. J. Ayer, was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956).

He was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.[5]

During the Second World War Ayer was a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent.[6]

He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959, after which he returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College.[1] He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 and knighted in 1970. He was known for his advocacy of humanism, and was the second President of the British Humanist Association (now known as Humanists UK).


Contents


	1 Life
	2 Philosophical ideas
	3 Works
	4 Awards
	5 Selected publications
	6 See also
	7 References
	7.1 Footnotes
	7.2 Works cited



	8 Further reading
	9 External links





Life[edit]

Ayer was born in St John's Wood, in north west London, to a wealthy family from continental Europe. His mother, Reine Citroën, was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France. His father, Jules Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.[7]

Ayer was educated at Ascham St Vincent's School, a former boarding preparatory school for boys in the seaside town of Eastbourne in Sussex, in which he started boarding at the comparatively early age of seven for reasons to do with the First World War, and Eton College, a boarding school in Eton (near Windsor) in Berkshire. It was at Eton that Ayer first became known for his characteristic bravado and precocity. Although primarily interested in furthering his intellectual pursuits, he was very keen on sports, particularly rugby, and reputedly played the Eton Wall Game very well.[8] 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.

After graduation from Oxford Ayer spent a year in Vienna, returned to England and published his first book, Language, Truth and Logic in 1936.  The first exposition in English of Logical Positivism as newly developed by the Vienna Circle, this made Ayer at age 26 the 'enfant terrible' of British philosophy.  In the Second World War he served as an officer in the Welsh Guards, chiefly in intelligence (Special Operations Executive (SOE) and MI6[9]).   Ayer was commissioned second lieutenant into the Welsh Guards from Officer Cadet Training Unit on 21 September 1940.[10]

After the war he briefly returned to the University of Oxford where he became a fellow and Dean of Wadham College. He thereafter taught philosophy at London University from 1946 until 1959, when he also started to appear on radio and television. He was an extrovert and social mixer who liked dancing and attending the 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.[11] 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 at times he could also be intimidating.[12]

Ayer was married four times to three women.[13] His first marriage was from 1932–1941 to (Grace Isabel) Renée (d. 1980), who subsequently married philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Ayer's friend and colleague.[13] In 1960 he married Alberta Constance (Dee) Wells, with whom he had one son.[13] Ayer's marriage to Wells was dissolved in 1983 and that same year he married Vanessa Salmon, former wife of politician Nigel Lawson. She died in 1985 and in 1989 he remarried Dee Wells, who survived him.[13] Ayer also had a daughter with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham Westbrook.[13]

From 1959 to his retirement in 1978, Sir Alfred 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 serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer reportedly asked, "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied, "And I am the former Wykeham 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.[14] Ayer was also involved in politics being involved in anti–Vietnam War activism, supporting the Labour Party (and then later the Social Democratic Party), Chairman of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Sport, and President of the Homosexual Law Reform Society.[15]

In 1988, a year before his death, Ayer wrote an article entitled, "What I saw when I was dead",[16] describing an unusual near-death experience. Of the experience, Ayer 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."[17] However, a few days 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".[18][19]

Ayer died on 27 June 1989. From 1980 to 1989 Ayer lived at 51 York Street, Marylebone, where a memorial plaque was unveiled on 19 November 1995.[20]


Philosophical ideas[edit]

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 was unverifiable and as such literally nonsense. He also criticises C. A. Mace's opinion[21] that metaphysics is a form of intellectual poetry.[22] The stance that a belief in "God" denotes no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as igtheism (for example, by Paul Kurtz).[23] In later years Ayer reiterated that he did not believe in God[24] and began to refer to himself as an atheist.[25] He followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston on the topic of religion.

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 judgments"[26]


He focuses on propositions of the first class—moral judgments—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 in normative ethics as opposed to meta-ethics) are too concrete for ethical philosophy.

Ayer argues that moral judgments 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" [27] 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.[28]


Between 1945 and 1947, together with Russell and George Orwell, he contributed a series of articles to Polemic, a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.[29][30]

Ayer was closely associated with the British humanist movement. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.[31] In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostics' Adoption Society and in the same year succeeded Julian Huxley as president of the British Humanist Association, a post he held until 1970. In 1968 he edited The Humanist Outlook, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism. In addition he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.[32]


Works[edit]

Ayer is best known for popularising the verification principle, in particular through his presentation of it in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). The principle was at the time at the heart of the debates of the so-called Vienna Circle which Ayer visited as a young guest. Others, including the leading light of the circle, Moritz Schlick, were already offering their own papers on the issue.[33] Ayer's own 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[34] 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 proposed that the distinction between a conscious man and an unconscious machine resolves itself into a distinction between 'different types of perceptible behaviour',[35] an argument which 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 proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence. These he felt were completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis. This sort of philosophy was an unfortunate strain in modern thought. He considered Heidegger to be the worst example of such philosophy, which Ayer believed to be entirely useless.

In 1972–1973 Ayer gave the Gifford Lectures at University of St Andrews, later published as The Central Questions of Philosophy. In the preface to the book, 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".[36] He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called "philosophy"– including the whole of metaphysics, theology and aesthetics– were not matters that could be judged as being true or false and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them.

In The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963), Ayer heavily criticized Wittgenstein's private language argument.

Ayer's sense-data theory in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow Oxonian J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of common language philosophy. Ayer responded to this in the essay "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-datum Theory?", which can be found in his Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).


Awards[edit]

He was awarded a Knighthood as Knight Bachelor in the London Gazette on 1 January 1970.[37]


Selected publications[edit]

	1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz. (2nd edition, 1946.) OCLC 416788667 Reprinted 2001 with a new introduction, London: Penguin. 
ISBN 978-0-14-118604-7
	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, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
	1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan. 
OCLC 557578816
	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-Data 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
	1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan. 
OCLC 464766212
	1972, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan. 
ISBN 978-0-333-12756-8
	1972, Russell, London: Fontana Modern Masters. 
OCLC 186128708
	1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld. 
ISBN 978-0-297-76634-6
	1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins. 
ISBN 978-0-00-216017-9
	1979, "Replies", in G. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, With His Replies, London: Macmillan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
	1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press
	1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld.
	1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
	1984, More of My Life, London: Collins.
	1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin.
	1986, Voltaire, New York: Random House.
	1988, Thomas Paine, London: Secker & Warburg.
	1989, "That undiscovered country", New Humanist, Vol. 104 (1), May, pp. 10–13.
	1990, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
	1992, The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer (The Library of Living Philosophers Volume XXI), edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, Open Court Publishing Co.


See also[edit]

	A priori knowledge
	List of British philosophers


References[edit]

Footnotes[edit]


	^ a b 
"Alfred Jules Ayer". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005. Retrieved 15 April 2016.

	^ 
Spurling, Hilary (24 December 2000). "The Wickedest Man in Oxford". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 9 April 2009. Retrieved 1 February 2008.

	^ "Ayer". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

	^ 
Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. London: Routledge. 1996. pp. 37–39. ISBN 0-415-06043-5.

	^ 
"Alfred Jules Ayer Facts". Your Dictionary. Retrieved 18 April 2015.

	^ 
Scott-Smith, Giles (2002). The politics of apolitical culture: the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and post-war American hegemony. London: Routledge. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-415-24445-9.

	^ 
Rogers, Ben (2000) [1999]. A.J. Ayer: A Life. London: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-09-953681-9. OL 6782148M.

	^ 
Rogers, Ben (2000) [1999]. A.J. Ayer: A Life. London: Vintage. pp. 42–44. ISBN 978-0-09-953681-9. OL 6782148M.

	^ 
Norton-Taylor, Richard (21 September 2010). "Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maugham all spied for Britain, admits MI6". The Guardian. London.

	^ 
"No. 34957". The London Gazette (Supplement). 27 September 1940. p. 5776.

	^ Radio Times article by Tim Heald, 20–26 August 1977

	^ 
Wilson, A. N. (2003). Iris Murdoch as I knew her. London: Hutchinson. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-09-174246-1.

	^ a b c d e Wollheim 2011

	^ Rogers (1999), p. 344.

	^ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/

	^ 
Ayer, A. J. "What I Saw When I Was Dead" (PDF). Retrieved 4 November 2011.

	^ 
Lougrhan, Gerry (18 March 2001), Can There Be Life After Life? Ask the Atheist!

	^ 
Ayer, A. J. (15 October 1988). "POSTSCRIPT TO A POSTMORTEM". The Spectator. Archived from the original on 12 March 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2019.

	^ 
Dennett, Daniel C. (3 November 2006). "THANK GOODNESS!". Edge.org. Retrieved 4 November 2011.

	^ 
"City of Westminster green plaques". Archived from the original on 16 July 2012. Retrieved 7 July 2011.

	^ "Representation and Expression," Analysis, Vol.1, No.3; "Metaphysics and Emotive Language," Analysis Vol. II, nos. 1 and 2,

	^ Ayer A. J. Language, Truth and Logic 1946/1952, New York/Dover

	^ 
Kurtz, Paul (1992). The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-87975-766-3.

	^ "I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it." Ayer, A.J. (1966). "What I Believe," Humanist, Vol.81 (8) August, p. 226.

	^ "I trust that my remaining an atheist will allay the anxieties of my fellow supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society." (Ayer 1989, p. 12)

	^ Ayer, Language, 103

	^ Ayer, Language, 106

	^ Ayer, Language, 107

	^ 
Buckman, David (13 November 1998). "Where are the Hirsts of the 1930s now?". The Independent. London.

	^ 
Collini, Stefan (2006). Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford University Press. p. 396. ISBN 978-0-19-929105-2.

	^ 
"Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 May 2011. Retrieved 28 April 2011.

	^ 
"Humanist Manifesto II". American Humanist Association. Archived from the original on 20 October 2012. Retrieved 4 October 2012.

	^ 
Schlick, Moritz (1935). "Unanswerable Questions". The Philosopher. The Philosophical Society of England. XIII. Retrieved 4 November 2011.

	^ page ix, "Language, Truth and Logic", Penguin, 2001

	^ page 140, Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin, 2001

	^ The Central Questions of Philosophy, p. ix

	^ 
"No. 44999". The London Gazette (Supplement). 30 December 1969. p. 1.




Works cited[edit]

	Ayer, A.J. (1989). "That undiscovered country", New Humanist, Vol. 104 (1), May, pp. 10–13.
	Rogers, Ben (1999). A.J. Ayer: A Life. New York: Grove Press. 
ISBN 978-0-8021-3869-9. (Chapter one and a review by Hilary Spurling, The New York Times, 24 December 2000.)
	
Wollheim, Richard (January 2011) [2004]. "Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules [Freddie]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/39796. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)


Further reading[edit]

	Jim Holt, "Positive Thinking" (review of Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times:  The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science, Basic Books, 449 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 74–76.
	Ted Honderich, Ayer's Philosophy and its Greatness.
	Anthony Quinton, Alfred Jules Ayer. Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (1996), pp. 255–282.
	Graham Macdonald, Alfred Jules Ayer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 7 May 2005.
	
Foster, John (1985), Ayer, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-7102-0602-X, 071020602X


External links[edit]

		Wikiquote has quotations related to: Alfred Jules Ayer


	Ayer's essay 'What I Saw When I was Dead'
	Ayer's Elizabeth Rathbone Lecture on Philosophy & Politics
	Ayer entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
	A.J. Ayer at Philosophy
	A.J. Ayer: Out of time by Alex Callinicos
	Works by A. J. Ayer at Open Library 
	Appearance on Desert Island Discs - 3 August 1984
	A. J. Ayer on IMDb


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Philosophy of Mind and Logic
1944–1959
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	 Wykeham Professor of Logic
1959–1978
	Succeeded by
Michael Dummett

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John Wisdom
	 President of the Aristotelian Society
1951–1952
	Succeeded by
H. B. Acton

	Preceded by
Julian Huxley
	 President of the British Humanist Association
1966–1969
	Succeeded by
Edmund Leach



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	Benjamin Lee Whorf
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	J. L. Austin
	Noam Chomsky
	Hans-Georg Gadamer
	Saul Kripke
	A. J. Ayer
	G. E. M. Anscombe
	Jaakko Hintikka
	Michael Dummett
	Donald Davidson
	Roger Gibson
	Paul Grice
	Gilbert Ryle
	P. F. Strawson
	Willard Van Orman Quine
	Hilary Putnam
	David Lewis
	John Searle
	Joxe Azurmendi
	Scott Soames
	Stephen Yablo
	John Hawthorne
	Stephen Neale
	Paul Watzlawick




	Theories	
	Causal theory of reference
	Contrast theory of meaning
	Contrastivism
	Conventionalism
	Cratylism
	Deconstruction
	Descriptivism
	Direct reference theory
	Dramatism
	Dynamic semantics
	Expressivism
	Linguistic determinism
	Mediated reference theory
	Nominalism
	Non-cognitivism
	Phallogocentrism
	Relevance theory
	Semantic externalism
	Semantic holism
	Structuralism
	Supposition theory
	Symbiosism
	Theological noncognitivism
	Theory of descriptions (Definite description)
	Unilalianism
	Verification theory




	Concepts	
	Ambiguity
	Cant
	Linguistic relativity
	Language
	Truth-bearer
	Proposition
	Use–mention distinction
	Concept
	Categories
	Set
	Class
	Family resemblance
	Intension
	Logical form
	Metalanguage
	Mental representation
	Presupposition
	Principle of compositionality
	Property
	Sign
	Sense and reference
	Speech act
	Symbol
	Sentence
	Statement
	more...




	Related articles	
	Analytic philosophy
	Philosophy of information
	Philosophical logic
	Linguistics
	Pragmatics
	Rhetoric
	Semantics
	Formal semantics
	Semiotics




	
	Category
	Task Force
	Discussion







	
	v
	t
	e


Positivism

	
	Perspectives	
	Antihumanism
	Empiricism
	Rationalism
	Scientism




	Declinations	
	Legal positivism
	Logical positivism / analytic philosophy
	Positivist school
	Postpositivism
	Sociological positivism
	Machian positivism (empirio-criticism)
	Rankean historical positivism
	Polish positivism
	Russian Machism




	Principal concepts	
	Consilience
	Demarcation
	Evidence
	Induction
	Justification
	Pseudoscience
	Critique of metaphysics
	Unity of science
	Verificationism




	Antitheses	
	Antipositivism
	Confirmation holism
	Critical theory
	Falsifiability
	Geisteswissenschaft
	Hermeneutics
	Historicism
	Historism
	Human science
	Humanities
	Methodological dualism
	Problem of induction
	Reflectivism




	Related paradigm shifts
in the history of science	
	Non-Euclidean geometry (1830s)
	Uncertainty principle (1927)




	Related topics	
	Behavioralism
	Post-behavioralism


	Critical rationalism
	Criticism of science
	Epistemology
	anarchism
	idealism
	nihilism
	pluralism
	realism


	Holism
	Instrumentalism
	Modernism
	Naturalism in literature
	Nomothetic–idiographic distinction
	Objectivity in science
	Operationalism
	Phenomenalism
	Philosophy of science
	Deductive-nomological model
	Ramsey sentence
	Sense-data theory


	Qualitative research
	Relationship between religion and science
	Sociology
	Social science
	Philosophy


	Structural functionalism
	Structuralism
	Structuration theory







	
	Positivist-related debate

	
	Method	
	Methodenstreit (1890s)
	Werturteilsstreit (1909–1959)
	Positivismusstreit (1960s)
	Fourth Great Debate in international relations (1980s)
	Science wars (1990s)




	Contributions	
	The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830)
	A General View of Positivism (1848)
	Critical History of Philosophy (1869)
	Idealism and Positivism (1879–1884)
	The Analysis of Sensations (1886)
	The Logic of Modern Physics (1927)
	Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)
	The Two Cultures (1959)
	The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)




	Proponents	
	Richard Avenarius
	A. J. Ayer
	Alexander Bogdanov
	Auguste Comte
	Eugen Dühring
	Émile Durkheim
	Ernst Laas
	Ernst Mach
	Berlin Circle
	Vienna Circle




	Criticism	
	Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909)
	History and Class Consciousness (1923)
	The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
	The Poverty of Historicism (1936)
	World Hypotheses (1942)
	Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951)
	Truth and Method (1960)
	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
	Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
	One-Dimensional Man (1964)
	Knowledge and Human Interests (1968)
	The Poverty of Theory (1978)
	The Scientific Image (1980)
	The Rhetoric of Economics (1986)




	Critics	
	Theodor W. Adorno
	Gaston Bachelard
	Mario Bunge
	Wilhelm Dilthey
	Paul Feyerabend
	Hans-Georg Gadamer
	Thomas Kuhn
	György Lukács
	Karl Popper
	Willard Van Orman Quine
	Max Weber




	Concepts in contention	
	Knowledge
	Objectivity
	Phronesis
	Truth
	Verstehen










	Category




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Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A._J._Ayer&oldid=996456309"


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		 This page was last edited on 26 December 2020, at 18:47 (UTC).
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