Alfred Jules Ayer citáty (18 citátov) | Citáty slávnych osobností

“The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer kniha Language, Truth, and Logic

Zdroj: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 16.
Kontext: The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express — that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.

“The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer kniha Language, Truth, and Logic

Zdroj: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 77.
Kontext: 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.

“The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer kniha Language, Truth, and Logic

Zdroj: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 49.
Kontext: The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution.

“To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer kniha Language, Truth, and Logic

Zdroj: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 20.

“I am using the word "perceive". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer

The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940). 
Kontext: I am using the word "perceive". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word. If there is thought to be a difficulty here, it is perhaps because there is also a correct and familiar usage of the word "perceive", in which to say of an object that it is perceived does carry the implication that it exists.

“The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer kniha Language, Truth, and Logic

Zdroj: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), Ch. 1, first lines.
Kontext: 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.

“There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis — about the meaning of what we say — and there is all of this … all of life.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer

Emphasizing his views on philosophy as something abstract and separate from normal life to Isaiah Berlin, in the early 1930s, as quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999) by Ben Rogers, p. 2.

“I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer

A statement he made soon after recovering from his near-death experience, as reported by Dr. Jeremy George, in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001) http://gonsalves.org/favorite/atheist.htm.

“No moral system can rest solely on authority.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer

Humanist Outlook (1968), p. 4.

“To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer

"The Meaning of Life".
The Meaning of Life and Other Essays (1990)

“If now I…say "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning — that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written "Stealing money!!" — where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer kniha Language, Truth, and Logic

Zdroj: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 107.

“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.”

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Alfred Jules Ayer

On his greater appreciation of the scenery of the world, after his near-death experience, as quoted in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001).