A. J. Ayer

110

A. J. Ayer : biography

29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989

In "The Concept of a Person and Other Essays" (1963), Ayer heavily criticized Wittgenstein’s private language argument.

Ayer’s sense-data theory in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow Oxonian J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of common language philosophy. Ayer responded to this in the essay "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-data Theory?", which can be found in his Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).

Personal life

Ayer was married four times to three women.ODNB His first marriage was from 1932-1941 to (Grace Isabel) Renée (d. 1980), who subsequently married philosopher Stuart Hampshire; Ayer’s friend and colleague. In 1960 he married Alberta Constance (Dee) Wells (1925–2003), with whom he had one son. Ayer’s marriage to Wells was dissolved in 1983 and that same year he married Vanessa Mary Addison, former wife of politician Nigel Lawson. She died in 1985 and in 1989 he remarried Dee Wells, who survived him. Ayer also had a daughter with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham Westbrook.

Near-death experience

In 1988, shortly before his death, Ayer wrote an article entitled, "What I saw when I was dead", describing an unusual near-death experience. Of the experience, Ayer first said that it "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death … will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be." However, a few days later he revised this, saying "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief".

In 2001 Dr. Jeremy George, the attending physician, claimed that Ayer had confided to him: "I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my books and opinions." Ayer’s son Nick, however, said that he had never mentioned this to him though he did find his father’s words to be extraordinary, and said he had long felt there was something possibly suspect about his father’s version of his near death experience.

Notes

Selected publications

  • 1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz. (2nd edition, 1946.) Reprinted 2001 with a new introduction, London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-118604-7
  • 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
  • 1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on freedom, phenomenalism, basic propositions, utilitarianism, other minds, the past, ontology.)
  • 1957, "The conception of probability as a logical relation", in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
  • 1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
  • 1963, The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on truth, privacy and private languages, laws of nature, the concept of a person, probability.)
  • 1967, "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Data Theory?" Synthese vol. XVIII, pp. 117–140. (Reprinted in Ayer 1969).
  • 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan.
  • 1969, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London: Macmillan. (Essays on knowledge, man as a subject for science, chance, philosophy and politics, existentialism, metaphysics, and a reply to Austin on sense-data theory [Ayer 1967].) ISBN 978-0-333-10517-7
  • 1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan.
  • 1972, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-12756-8
  • 1972, Russell, London: Fontana Modern Masters.
  • 1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld. ISBN 978-0-297-76634-6
  • 1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-216017-9
  • 1979, "Replies", in G. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, With His Replies, London: Macmillan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
  • 1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • 1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld.
  • 1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • 1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin.
  • 1984, More of My Life, London: Collins.
  • 1988, Thomas Paine, London: Secker & Warburg.
  • 1989, "That undiscovered country", New Humanist, Vol. 104 (1), May, pp. 10–13.
  • 1990, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  • 1992, The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer (The Library of Living Philosophers Volume XXI), edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, Open Court Publishing Co.