Ayer, Anscombe and Empiricism

Alasdair MacIntyre

  • Perception and Identity: Essays presented to A.J. Ayer with his replies to them edited by G.E. MacDonald
    Macmillan, 358 pp, £15.00, December 1979, ISBN 0 333 27182 3
  • Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G.E.M. Anscombe edited by Cora Diamond and Jenny Teichmann
    Harvester, 205 pp, £16.95, December 1979, ISBN 0 85527 985 0

Locke, Berkeley and Hume were three very different philosophers with very different preoccupations, modes of argument and attitudes towards the world. But by the middle of the 19th century it had become the custom to view them as the successive representatives of a single empiricist tradition. It is the English rather than the British who excel in the invention of traditions. And although the presence of an Irish bishop and a Scottish sceptic in the empiricist trinity made it necessary to think of the tradition under the title of ‘British’ rather than ‘English’ empiricism, it was always as a very specifically English cultural tradition – like cricket, afternoon tea and Anglicanism – that empiricism flourished.

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