Alfred J. Ayer; Noted British Philosopher
Alfred J. Ayer, the most celebrated and representative British philosopher of his generation, who believed that philosophical problems are rooted in a vague and muddled use of language, has died. He was 78.
Sir Alfred, regarded as the philosophical heir of the late Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, died Tuesday night in University College Hospital here after a lengthy respiratory illness.
Although he became widely known outside academic circles for his anti-religious views, his lasting reputation will rest upon his philosophical publications.
His first book, “Language, Truth and Logic,” published in 1936 when he was only 25, was considered the first exposition of logical positivism in the English language.
Ayer said that for any statement to mean anything it must be verifiable by experience or analysis, and if that is not possible, the statement is merely an expression of opinion. This led him to atheism.
Ranging widely between the ideas of linguistic philosophers Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the movement Ayer helped develop accepts that language must be strictly analyzed and redefined if there is to be any possibility of using it as an intelligible means of logical argument.
The philosophical school of linguistic analysts now dominates many British and American universities.
“Language, Truth and Logic,” which jolted metaphysicians by its assault on “much of what has passed for philosophy,” owed a debt to empiricists such as Russell and Rudolf Carnap.
“I maintain that there is nothing in the nature of philosophy to warrant the existence of conflicting philosophical ‘schools,’ ” Ayer wrote. “And I attempt to substantiate this by providing a definitive solution of the problems which have been the chief sources of controversy between philosophers in the past.”
“The principles of logic and metaphysics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else,” he added.
Ayer wrote “The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge” in 1940 and “The Problem of Knowledge” in 1956, as well as volumes of philosophical essays and histories of modern philosophy in which he extended the traditions of British empiricism.
Throughout his career Ayer remained firmly in the empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell. The last two of these Ayer acknowledged as his masters, and his most recent works included two brief studies of Russell (1972) and of Hume (1980). Ayer concluded his autobiographical “A Part of My Life” (1977) with the modest remark that he would consider it “glory enough . . . to be thought even to have played Horatio to Russell’s Hamlet.”
Sir Alfred, who was knighted in 1970, was born Alfred Jules Ayer, the only child of a well-to-do French-Swiss father and a Dutch-Jewish mother.
Educated at Eton and at Oxford University, he was a philosophy lecturer and research student at Oxford’s Christ Church College from 1932 to 1944, and dean of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1946. He served as an intelligence officer in France during World War II.
Ayer, known to colleagues and students as Freddie, was professor of mind and logic at University College, London, from 1946 to 1959, then professor of logic at the University of Oxford and fellow of New College, Oxford, until 1978.
He was a visiting professor at New York University from 1948 to 1949; at City College, New York, from 1961 to 1962, and at Bard College in New York State beginning in 1987.
