Blackwell Reference Online

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A. J. Ayer rose to early philosophical fame with the publication in 1936, when he was 25 years old, of what remained his most famous, or infamous, book, Language, Truth and Logic . The work is his own version of the logical positivism characteristic of the Vienna Circle (whose meetings he had attended for three months in 1932–3), his outlook being closest to that of their leader, Moritz Schlick. The book is also strongly influenced by the British empiricist tradition, in particular by Hume and Russell. It was something of a bombshell to British philosophers and became for them the paradigm statement of logical positivism, threatening the outlook of some, providing an exciting intellectual liberation for others. The book opens with the striking statement: The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of philosophical enquiry. (1946: 33) So far as philosophy goes, Ayer's concern is to show the meaninglessness of metaphysical theories about a reality beyond the empirical. More generally, he also claims to show that religious statements, as usually now intended, are meaningless, as also are statements of fundamental ethical principle (except as mere expressions of emotion). To establish the meaninglessness of all such statements ... log in or subscribe to read full text