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“... or less united in seeing Wittgenstein as a burnt-out wreck and a disgrace to the profession: A.J. Ayer, for example, described him as a maniacal egotist who took refuge within a ‘cénacle of the faithful’, and Isaiah Berlin thought he had been reduced to peddling some trashy variety of ‘imaginative romanticism’. The gossip did not cease with ...”

“... cultural commentators – rather than media-friendly academics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper or A.J. Ayer. The very enterprise of comparative historical sociology, magnificent though it is in its tireless attempt to find pattern and explanation across societies and millennia, is bound to take an aerial view, and perhaps that, too, helped distance Gellner from ...”

“... through it – and there cannot be many these days – with an impression of total confusion; A.J. Ayer was ‘an engaging man ... in whose company I delighted’, but his work was unstable and confusing, and because he had a near-death experience, it is impossible to tell, says Johnson, if he died believing in God or not. But how much better, in Johnson’s ...”

“... by Amit Chaudhuri and Romesh Gunesekera, reflections and memoirs and poems by everyone from A.J. Ayer to Fiona Pitt-Kethley. We often used to argue about Pitt-Kethley’s super-sexually frank work in the office. Karl was a believer and said something very useful about her work: ‘When people are shocked by something,’ he told me, ‘they never admit to ...”

“... Anne’s College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin and had classes with A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch; most fatefully, a sojourn at the Sorbonne, where, like Audrey Hepburn pixie-ing through the new philosophy of Empathicalism in Funny Face, she met – oh, enough roll call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or ...”

“... of a ‘science of pure being’ was preposterous and self-contradictory, and agreed with A.J. Ayer’s argument, in Language Truth and Logic, that so-called ‘metaphysical propositions’ are unverifiable and literally meaningless. But Ayer’s inference that metaphysics should be ‘eliminated’ and replaced with ...”