@jikkh2x
Ayer said of logical positivism in 1978 - "Nearly all of it was false... Logical positivism died a long time ago. I don't think much of Language, Truth, and Logic is true. It was full of mistakes".
@rootberg
Lovely to see all these videos. One of my professors was a pupil of Ayers.
@JulianJonesMusic
Ayer is dope he got into a dispute with mike Tyson over Naomi Campbell that's pretty cool
@doethcaru
What an astonishingly clear, vigorous and erudite speaker. This guy fizzes! I've been trying to get my hands on these videos for years. Great stuff! Don't suppose you have debate between Ayer, Don Cupitt and Sperber, chaired by Magee as part of the thinking aloud series? My copy was destroyed.
@jenslyn87
I never knew this, but it certainly seems plausible. What a hero!
@AndysEdits
i've been writing about Ayer in A-level essays for 2 years now - nice to finally put a face to a name!
@ghandi8749
I'm reading Language, Truth, and Logic at the moment, and I must say Ayer is an amazing writer.
@touyubeusr
Wow. Smoking. I'm not surprised that ayer is smoking. Its that he's the first philosopher in this series to do so.
@rederic2004
Ayer's a much more interesting talker than I imagined he would be.
@simplycharly1309
Outstanding series! You certainly won't find this kind of tv programming ever in the US which is a shameful pity.
@ral9590
I am not arguing on behalf of theism or religion, but just to be clear Mr. Ayer had a near death experience before he died - he saw a light and wrote a letter about his experience to the BBC. It does make you think.
@Merooba
Thanks; I had forgotten that if I ever knew it, though I just thumbed through my well-underlined copy of LT&L and didn't find it. Unlike the verification principle itself, the fact that Ayer made such a statement is easily verifiable. With no desire to cavil (as Prof. Blanshard would say), do you happen to recall where it occurs? I share your misgivings about Ayer's amendment, which seems a bit ad hoc. Of course Wittgenstein would love it, amounting as it does to a stipulation about language.
@Ingens_Scherz
Studying "Language, Truth and Logic" at the age of 19 in the first year of my degree many years ago, I had in my mind a bizarre image of the author that resembled some sort of titanic mutant combination of Plato and Karl Marx. Had I known at the time that Ayer was 25 when he published it, I'm sure I'd have been far less intimidated by its content and far more inclined, in the spirit of gratitude, to buy the old man a pint.
@tyz228
naturphilosphie1-carnap distinguished internal, substantive questions about reality from external, framework questions. the latter were the sorts of questions metaphysics was concerned with. carnap changed those questions from substantive questions, questions about reality, to basically pragmatic questions. questions about what sort of framework it would be best to adopt for a particular purpose. what carnap denied was that the questions about the "ultimate categories of being", or "constituents of reality" were substantive questions about what there really is, what really exists. the only questions were those of what system, what framework, it would be best to adopt to achieve a certain purpose. metaphysics was dead.
@michaelwalker2676
Logical positivism makes a lot of sense to me. It is restricted to the obvious, visual world, excluding metaphysics. I got a lot fom Ayer's 'Language, Truth and Logic'.
@ilikezappa
didn`t A J Ayer play for Leeds Utd in the 70`s ? I remember some great games with him , Billy Bremner and Eddie Gray
@rickcarpenterslp4381
I am not very sympathetic to logical positivism or any of its heirs (e.g., behaviorism), but I so much enjoyed this video. Thanks for posting. I had no idea of the historical and political context. Humanizes the whole project, ironically.
@jazsminacc982
textbook url?
@cvb777
I love these old interviews where people smoke and make themselves comfortable. Those were the days...
@Jinxyzzy