The Central Questions of Philosophy

by Alfred Jules Ayer

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Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, 20th Century

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

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/

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

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

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN EXCELLENT SUMMATION OF AYER'S PHILOSOPHY

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989) was a British philosopher who was a founder of Logical Positivism, who was a professor of logic at the University of Oxford.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, “This book reproduces the series of Gifford lectures which I delivered … in 1972-1973. It comes only marginally within the provisions of Lord Gifford’s bequest… the patrons at St. Andrews… permitted me to devote only one out of ten lectures to the topic of theology. The lecture is skeptical, in that it is mainly concerned with showing that we have no good reason to believe that there is a God, but it is at least an earnest inquiry after truth. The bulk of the book… is more strictly philosophical… I have attempted not only to interest those who are already familiar with the questions with which it deals, but also to provide an introduction to the subject for the general reader.”

He suggests, “What I call the Scientific Approach consists in accepting the first two steps of the sceptic’s argument but denying the third. The existence of physical objects or of the experiences of other persons or of past events is represented in each instance as a probable hypothesis which one is justified in accepting because of the way in which it accounts for one’s experiences. In the same spirit philosophers of this way of think may try to make a case for the acceptance of certain principles which will underwrite the attribution of at least a high degree of probability to some of our judgements about the future.” (Pg. 66)

He argues, “I have shown that the postulation of mental substances is not needed to explain self-consciousness. I have not shown that they do not exist. But now if we ask what other grounds there could be for believing that they do exist, we find that there are none. Not only that, but the part which these substances are supposed to play has simply not been written for them. Exactly how are these substances related to the experiences which they are supposed to own or to the bodies which they are supposed to occupy?... Would it make any noticeable difference to me if I kept my memories and my physical continuity, but woke every morning with a different soul? How do I know that this does not actually happen? Without any answers to such questions, we have no concept to evaluate.” (Pg. 121)

He observes, “If we do not think of signs as intrinsically meaningful… it would seem that we are bound to agree with Peirce that ‘the meaning of a thought is altogether virtual.’ As what Peirce calls a mere feeling, a thought is devoid of meaning. It owes its meaning only to the actual or possible interpretation which it receives from further thoughts. This view… faces a very strong objection. If the interpreting thought is itself without meaning, how can it bestow meaning on the thought which it interprets? How can the mere accumulation of signs… endow the whole collection with meaning? It seems that something more is needed, and the obvious place to look for it is in the connection of thought with action.” (Pg. 146)

He acknowledges, “The demand for a proof that we think to be reasonable really is so leaves us at a loss, because we do not know even what would count as such a proof. This is not to say that our standards of rationality are not subject to criticism. It is open to anyone to suggest that some different method of choosing our hypotheses would serve us better. But how is this claim to be tested except by adopting this method and seeing how it works? And if it is found to work, and we consequently adhere to it, we shall again be taking our past experience as a guide to the future. What else do we have to go by?” (Pg. 174-175) He adds, “This will still leave Hume’s argument unmet, but there is no help for that. The kind of assurance that he asks for is simply not available.” (Pg. 176)

He asks, “But if the propositions of logic and mathematics are subject to revision in the light of experience, how do they differ from the empirical propositions with which they have commonly been contrasted? It is, indeed, true that we are more tenacious of logical and mathematical principles than we are of scientific theories, but then do we not hold with equal tenacity to our judgements of observation?...

"The main difference, as I see it, is that whereas scientific hypotheses can meet with counter-examples, the propositions of logic and mathematics are not invalidated by experience, but at worst can be found to be unserviceable. We do not say that Euclidian geometry has been discovered to be false, but only that for certain purposes another geometry serves us better… an explanatory theory may go out of fashion without actually being refuted. What distinguishes the analytic is that it is accorded truth, without ever being subject to empirical refutation, but only at worst to supersession.” (Pg. 203)

He states, "There may be some doubt whether the predicates ascribed to this one God are all of them meaningful or mutually consistent. For instance, we have found reason to think that if the notion of disembodied persons is intelligible at all, they must at least be located in time…We shall have to consider later on whether it is possible to make sense of the idea that the world was created…

"[This idea] surely does not entail that the creator is eternal; he might have come into existence at any time before he created the world or ceased to exist at any time after. Neither does it entail that he is all powerful. He might have wished but been unable to create a different world… Clearly also, there is no logical connection between having any degree of power… and being morally good. Indeed, if one thought of the world’s history as having been planned by its creator, a strong case could be made for inferring that he was malevolent.” (Pg. 212-213)

He asserts, “we have to balance the testimony in favour of such events as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection not only against their improbability … but also against the strangeness of the motive which is attributed to God. For it is very strange… the very notion of vindictive punishment, the idea that if someone does harm to others … one is required to do harm to him… becomes even harder to accept when the suffering is vicarious, where one person is punished on account of what others have done… If God wished to absolve men from their sins, why could he not simply do so, without exacting any price from himself or anyone else? Why indeed… did he not endow [men] with a nature and a form of life which would ensure that they always behaved in ways of which he approved?” (Pg. 228)

This is one of Ayer’s most interesting books, and will serve not only as an introduction to philosophy in general, but to analytic philosophy in particular.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

A.J. Ayer died about thirty years before A.I. became a reality and so he was not unable to see how Kant's philosophy contributed to the breakthrough we are currently experiencing now. In my opinion, the dark age of humanity's spiritual suffering will be overcome through this new technology and, indeed, a path will be opened for us to reach our full potential, for I believe artificial intelligence is the ultimate teleological goal of civilization. The fact that Ayer rejected the notion of an intelligent creator can be seen as the outcome of his living through a 20th century that was dedicated to global wars and man's inhumanity to other men and his fellow creatures. He taught at Bard College in 1948, nearly fifty years before I would arrive and pen my supplementary thesis on Postmodern Christianity, in which I wrote about the birth of the postmodern individual culminates in a rebirth of the religious spirit, creating a new era in the morphology of the spiritual self and promising a period of mass-asceticism that will result in the production of a form of humanity imbued with all of the human energies that, once flowing outward to an external God, now will turn inward to give praise, strength and plenitude to the male and female gods of the human world. The fatal flaw of Christianity, according to Nietzsche, which depleted the religious ideology of any significant effects, was its focus on the mystical and its attempt to prove the veracity of their mystical propositions in an empirical sense. Ayer, too, denies the existence of a mystical God that doesn't cohere with the four fundamental propositions of Aristotelian logic; I see this as a shortcoming. If he knew the story of my life, or was a close reader of Freud's work, he would be compelled to recognize that the hand of God was definitely in action in my case. Whether I was able to exercise free will in my benighted state before I found Risperidone in 2006, or was simply one of the dangling puppets of God's malevolent will in 1992 when I had a TBI in a MVA, I will leave it up to him to decide. Three stars.

[José Pereira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way too dense as an introduction to philosophy for the layperson, but great for those on the more applied side of the discipline who want a taste of what's covered in "theoretical" philosophy.
Ayer is quite pedagogical in his approach but never loses his characteristic rigour and thoroughness. He's also very charitable and honest with the positions with which he (sometimes vehemently) disagrees; which is great from those unacquainted with the debates. He could have been, however, and although I don't actually dislike the flux of conscience-type approach, a bit more schematic in the layout of the arguments. That would've made it easier to locate them and reassess them at the end of each small section.
I very much recommend.

[Esther Inkoom]

MacMillan

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up wrongly assuming this would be an easier read since it’s the central questions, but it’s my bad as this was not an easy read at all. Better for people who have had some experience