Wittgenstein

by Alfred Jules Ayer

The fame of Ludwig Wittgenstein as one the most important and original philosophers of the century-and also as an intense, magnetic personality-has grown steadily since his death in 1951.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, Linguistics

163 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

In 1910, Sir Alfred Jules Ayer was born in London into a wealthy family. His father was a Swiss Calvinist and his mother was of Dutch-Jewish ancestry. Ayer attended Eton College and studied philosophy and Greek at Oxford University. From 1946 to 1959, he taught philosophy at University College London. He then became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. Ayer was knighted in 1970. Included among his many works are The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), The Problem of Knowledge (1956), The Origins of Pragmatism (1968), Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969), Bertrand Russell (1972) and Hume (1980), about philosopher David Hume. Later in life, Ayer frequently identified himself as an atheist and became active in humanist causes. He was the first vice president of the British Humanist Association and served as its president from 1965 to 1970. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was also an honorary member of the Bertrand Russell. In 1988, Ayer had a near-death experience in the United States after choking on salmon and subsequently losing consciousness. He wrote of his experience in “That Undiscovered Country” (New Humanist, May 1989): “My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god. 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.” He died shortly after at age 78 in London. D. 1989.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/AyerbyT...

http://badassphilosophers.tumblr.com/...

http://www.informationphilosopher.com...

Reviews

[Zoonanism · Rating 4 out of 5]

Near the end of this delightful exposition Ayer whilst considering Wittgenstein's influence quotes a comment by John Wisdom, who was appointed Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge after the master. In response to the question "What was Wittgenstein's biggest contribution to philosophy" Wisdom had stated "His asking the question can we play chess without the queen?". Ayer reflects that: "the answer to this question seems arbitrary and it's profundity escapes me."

This healthy skepticism and refusal to be taken by seeming profundity of declarations of tractus, philosophical investigations, the blue and brown books, the commentary on Frazer, etc etc is what makes Ayer so worthwhile.

Take those devilish simple objects of tractatus, charged with making up the substance of the world.
Those unalterable and subsistent yet colorless jelly beans.

Where are they to be found asks Ayer?

Can they be our atoms or subatomic particles? Then how would the operation of double negation applied to propositions which depict their configuration yield the propositions of everyday discourse?

The N-operator stationed at CERN, a classic image :) hard at work

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

There seems to be very little in Wittgenstein left over that is fit to appeal to philosophers after A.J. Ayer's critical analysis of his work reduces to a skeleton the logical principles of his private language-games to a minor status, becoming nothing more than an essentially materialist phenomenon within the orbit of private property. In a reversal of what was Marx's critique of Hegelian philosophy, Ayer asserts that philosophical language may not interfere with life, but can only describe it. Nonetheless, Ayer says that Wittgenstein offers a path for the work of philosophers of the future due to the fact that his later work implies a relationship of identity between the mind and the world and, as he first showed in his Tractatus, a world without a corresponding picture is meaningless and is in fact nonsensical; thus Kant's statement that intuitions without concepts is proven to be true. There is more to Wittgenstein than this somewhat obvious corroboration of Kant would suggest, however. Wittgenstein's picture theory, Ayer contends, is instrumental in the production of reality itself in the sense that our relationship with the world is structured and connected in a fundamental way according to the language-game that forms those realities which a historically determined set of propositions have been used to describe. Thus, Ayer concludes, Wittgenstein's observation that the world consists of my statements about the Being of the world, which describes everything that is the case - is correct not only in a positive sense, but also on a deep metaphysical level. I don't quite understand this notion myself, nor, indeed, am I truly able to face the ultimate consequences of the chain of thought which proceeds from these insights, but I think it might have a relation to those large-scale models of language-systems that are currently being implemented in the technology of artificial intelligence. Further study is required on my part. Three stars to Sir A.J. Ayer for showing a possible way that flies might make their way out of the bottle.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 2 out of 5]

【A Philosophy of a Novel Reader/ Ludwig Wittgenstein / A.J. Ayer】

As Ayer admitted in this book, Wittgenstein was more of a novel reader than a philosophy one, and he greatly enjoyed magazines which featured Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sadly, as Ayer also admitted, this sentence "I happen to believe that the legend of King Arthur is based upon fact, but whether I am right on this point or not, my statement that King Arthur fought the Saxons makes equally good sense." (P22) was exactly a description of Wittgenstein's philosophy's crux which tortured a lot of philosophers. However, if one knew enough about the particular types of detective stories around the time of Wittgenstein, it's not that distant from this ambivalence.

Detective stories were getting less and less logical at least before the emergence of spy thrillers, which you can see even in Father Brown series and Sherlock Holmes' later stories. Ayer's comparison of Wittgenstein's Tractus to Kant was probably correct in saying "limiting metaphysics." As the genre popularized, detective fictions also had to limit metaphysics previously shown in early stories of Sherlock Holmes, for example.

His clarification of Wittgenstein's more radical shift to saying that mental image is not always necessary for our cognition (p46). It's something which, for example, a reader of Agatha Christie mysteries has to admit. You might get to guess the criminal without mental images about characters, but with solid mental images about them, it just gets difficult.

And it's even the case with his later language game. Here comes another important question from Ayer. Is private language being unintelligible to others logical necessity? (P75) I'd say, yes, if one is reading a crime fiction in which 99% of murders were not even intelligible in their cause. It's certainly written, but objectly, very weak. Moreover, the philosophy of psychology is even more thriller-like. You just have to see characters "on the basis of my own kinaesthetic sensations," no matter what Ayer said about it. That's how a thriller novels works in my opinion. Ayer doesn't like it though.

I do acknowledge this book clarified a lot of points to discuss seriously. However, they were going to be solved in more of a new historicist studies on genre fictions than relying solely on analytic philosophy itself.

[Randal Samstag · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a review, just a comment: Freddy never understood what happened to Wittgenstein after 1929.