Search Results

“... of life with her mother, the journalist Dee Wells, and her stepfather, the philosopher A.J. Ayer. Using their holiday house in Provence as a starting point, she wanders between family stories, anecdotes of mid-century London society and the sort of travel writing that mixes picturesque scraps of history with hymns to the local food and drink – all of ...”

“... work of inquiry that ventures beyond the bounds of quantitative and experimental reasoning; A.J. Ayer, who insisted that much past and present philosophy is unverifiable nonsense; and, more recently, Daniel Dennett, who indicts the discipline as largely ‘self-indulgent, clever play’. In almost every case, the philosopher who criticises philosophy wants ...”

“... by treating the attachment of words to things as a part of human life. Hilary Putnam has reviewed Ayer’s Philosophy in the 20th Century against this background in a recent issue of Partisan Review. The pattern is complex but the main lines are easily discernible. Russell is one point of origin for contemporary analytic philosophy and Wittgenstein is ...”

“... point), and afterwards I felt I had a long way to go philosophically. A few days later Professor Ayer, who was one of the examiners, informed me that he had been obliged to require that my papers be typed, on account of their extreme illegibility: I would have to dictate them to a typist in the presence of an invigilator, both of whom I would have to pay. I ...”

“... have even found his descriptions of his own procedures disingenuous. That is the reaction of A.J. Ayer in his new book, Wittgenstein. He thinks there is no doubt about it. He roundly declares that Wittgenstein’s ‘repeated preference for description over explanation and the avoidance of theory which he claimed to practise and enjoined upon his readers are ...”

“... our own time, the latest and perhaps the last of this chain of great figures has been Sir Alfred Ayer. Ayer shares with Russell and with Mill not only an intellectual allegiance to empiricist doctrine, and a willingness to identify himself with a certain kind of public cause: he shares, too, a certain temper of mind, which ...”

“... Philosophy in the 20th century’ or ‘Analytical philosophy in the 20th century’? Ayer is well aware that the two descriptions are not co-extensive. He marks his recognition of the fact by devoting one chapter of his history to Collingwood and another to selected representatives of phenomenology and existentialism ...”

“... appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading. On the other hand, A.J.P. Taylor wrote some 1500 book reviews in the course of his career, many of which appeared in the Sunday Express, which in the late 1950s had a circulation of four million and paid him up to £100 a time – a very considerable sum. These are among the many ...”

“... reason’. One of Cavell’s heroes, J.L. Austin, would say on occasion (arguing with A.J. Ayer, for example) that the reasons we have are sufficient; it’s only a fantasy of perfection that makes them seem inadequate. But Cavell doesn’t want us to go in that direction. For him scepticism is irrefutable and inescapable, the mistake we need to keep ...”

“... which J.B. Priestley sits smoking a cigar and reaching for the port while Isaiah Berlin and A.J. Ayer discuss concepts of liberty. Curtis stays with Berlin for an unusually long time, perhaps as relieved as we are to have a talking head worth listening to, especially one so idiosyncratic, caught at a time when television still made room for such voices. It ...”

“... A.J. Ayer began his Bertrand Russell with his customary insouciance, saying that Russell was ‘unique among the philosophers of this century in combining the study of the specialised problems of philosophy, not only with an interest in both the natural and the social sciences, but with an engagement in primary as well as higher education, and an active participation in politics ...”

“... with physical bondage, though this always carried with it fetters of the mind as well: Professor Ayer’s is concerned very much with mental fetters, and some of mankind’s attempts to shake them off, but his subject brings him, too, in contact with the history of slavery. He cites a late writing of Paine, denouncing Louisiana’s wish to be allowed to ...”

“... When the London Review of Books began to run a Diary in 1982, A.J.P. Taylor was one of its authors. He always delivered to an exact length, well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger ...”

“... There must be more than this.’ Perhaps Toynbee imagined himself talking with his old friend A.J. Ayer, whose good-humoured scorn for these non-propositions, and especially for the idea that anything we cannot know is ‘better’ than anything we can, would be boundless. Yet the bosoms of the restless, the dissatisfied and the miserable would return an echo ...”

“... A computer is a tool, working the intentions of its designer or user. It is no more malevolent than the village clock whose chimes wake us in the night, or the car whose failed brakes run us down. We invest it with personality because it is an instrument of the mind, rather than of the hand. It extends and mimics the very function that has always seemed to distinguish us biologically from other organisms – the capacity to reason ...”