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A Defence of Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

A. J. Ayer
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Extract

I am very much honoured to have been asked to make the closing speech at this Conference. Since this is the first time for over fifty years that a philosophical congress of this scope has been held in England, I hope that you will think it suitable for me to devote my lecture to the revival of the empiricist tradition in British philosophy during this century. I shall begin by examining the contribution of the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore. Though he first owed his fame to his book Principia Ethica (Moore, 1903) regarded as a work of genius by the Cambridge Apostles and their associates in Bloomsbury, who did not venture to question Moore's mistaken view of ‘good’ as an unanalysable non-natural quality, his reputation now chiefly rests on his subsequent defence of common sense.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 30 , September 1991 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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References

1 This lecture was written in April 1988 for the closing plenary session of the World Congress of Philosophy held in Brighton in August of 1988.

2 Ayer was at this time not well enough to attend the World Congress, and this lecture was read for him by another. This enabled one of the less incompetent journalists reporting the Congress to make a joke. Freddie was good-naturedly, if not vastly, amused.