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A. J. Ayer: An Appreciation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Extract
As the editor noted in the last number Freddie Ayer, or Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, played a considerable part in launching the vast enterprise of the Bentham edition. It is fitting, therefore, that something be said in Utilitas about his achievement as a philosopher and the extent to which he falls within the same broad empiricist and utilitarian tradition to which Bentham and J. S. Mill belonged.
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References
1 Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth and Logic, London, 1936, revised edn., 1946.Google Scholar
2 Ayer, A. J., The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London, 1940Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., Philosophical Essays, London, 1954Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., The Problem of Knowledge, London, 1956Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., The Central Questions of Philosophy, London, 1973.Google Scholar
3 James, William, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York, 1907, p. 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 See his ‘Reflections on Existentialism’, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London, 1969, chapter 13Google Scholar. I might note in passing that he had a very good grasp of the thought of these existentialists and, if one purged his account thereof of its sharp criticisms, even enthusiasts for Heidegger might have to accept this essay as a helpful account, more so perhaps than the one he gave in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London, 1982.Google Scholar
5 Ayer, A. J., Probability and Evidence, London, 1972, pp. 89–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 This method is practised, though in a less debunking manner, against Bentham's egoistic hedonist psychology. See his ‘The Principle of Utility’, Philosophical Essays, pp. 264–67Google Scholar, reprinted from Jeremy Bentham and the Law, ed. Keeton, G. W. and Schwarzenberger, G., London, 1948.Google Scholar
7 Ayer, A. J., Thomas Paine, London, 1988.Google Scholar
8 See Metaphysics and Common Sense, p. 259.Google Scholar
9 Of course, utilitarians have been accused from Macaulay onwards of going on principles too much and not enough on facts. To the extent that this is true, it shows that none of these distinctions between types of thinkers hold without substantial qualifications. That does not deprive them of power to illuminate. Upon the whole it seems fair enough to say that the utilitarian inspiration is to suppose that moral and political judgements of any worth must arise from careful empirical enquiry.
10 James's pragmatism, incidentally, has been thought, not quite fairly, to work somewhat the other way, which is one reason why enthusiasm for him has usually been somewhat qualified among those empiricists, and near empiricists, whom he thought his natural brothers, as expressed in his dedication of Pragmatism to the memory of J. S. Mill. None the less, Ayer's own later views on the self and his constructivist account of our knowledge of physical reality were worked out in the first place as a development of James's views. See Ayer, A. J., The Origins of Pragmatism, Part Two.Google Scholar
11 See Metaphysics and Common Sense, pp. 210–18.Google Scholar
12 See his ‘Sources of Intolerance’ in On Toleration, ed. Mendus, Susan and Edwards, David, Oxford, 1987.Google Scholar
13 I doubt if any serious thinker, apart perhaps from Tolstoy, has been a fatalist in this sense. The best depiction of the fatalist frame of mind of which I know is given by Wilkie Collins in his novel Armadale.
14 The Origins of Pragmatism, p. 110.Google Scholar
15 Philosophical Essays, Chapter 12.
16 Ayer, A. J., Freedom and Morality, Oxford, 1984, pp. 15–16Google Scholar; see also Metaphysics and Common Sense, pp. 238–39.Google Scholar
17 See Probability and Evidence, passim.
18 Metaphysics and Common Sense, chapter 15, esp. pp. 15–16.Google Scholar
19 See note 12.
20 Philosophical Essays, chapter 10.
21 See note 16. In his book on Hume Ayer argues that in essence Hume's view of moral judgement was the emotivist one. It is perhaps worth noting that Bentham himself seems to have interpreted the principle of utility itself in an emotivist way in a late statement in Constitutional Code.
22 See note 6.
23 Metaphysics and Common Sense, chapter 15, especially at pp. 257–58.Google Scholar
24 Freedom and Morality, pp. 49–50.Google Scholar
25 Metaphysics and Common Sense, p. 259Google Scholar
26 See note 12.