A.J. Ayer Quotes - Page 2

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• Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.

  A.J. Ayer

  Men, Good Man, Saint

  A. J. Ayer (1988). “Bertrand Russell”, p.155, University of Chicago Press

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• I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

  A.J. Ayer

  Beautiful, Years, Sea

  "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?". National Post, March 3, 2001.

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• We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.

  A.J. Ayer

  Reality, Limits, Significance

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• I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

  A.J. Ayer

  Philosophy, Criticism, Analysis

  "A.J. Ayer: A Life" by Ben Rogers, (p. 2), 1999.

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• I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

  A.J. Ayer

  Thinking, Atheism, Facts

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• There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

  A.J. Ayer

  Philosophy, Analysis

  "A.J. Ayer: A Life" by Ben Rogers, (p. 2), 1999.

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• The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.

  A.J. Ayer

  Self, Principles, Use

  "Language, Truth, and Logic" by A.J. Ayer, (p. 77), 1936.

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• The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.

  A.J. Ayer

  Truth, Philosophy, Philosophical

  "Language, Truth, and Logic" by A.J. Ayer, (Ch. 1), 1936.

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• In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact.

  A.J. Ayer

  Philosophy, Character, Enquiry

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