Word: ayers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...modest but possibly more productive intellectual task: discovering the meaning of words and sentences by examining how they are ordinarily used, and by classifying different kinds of statements. Linguistic analysis grew out of a philosophic movement which had no use for theology: logical positivism. Such philosophers as A. J. Ayer of Oxford and Vienna's Rudolf Carnap, now a professor emeritus at U.C.L.A., argued that the only meaningful propositions were the analytic statements of logic and mathematics, or statements that could be verified by empirical procedures-which meant that the ethereal language of theology was literally meaningless...
Language Games. Many philosophers -including Ayer himself-have now backed away from that dogmatic view, thanks in large part to the influence of an eccentric Austrian-born Cam bridge don named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. Wittgenstein, perhaps the century's most important philosopher, believed that there was a wide variety of discourse-ranging from jokes to the "God-talk" of theologians -that could not be empirically verified, but nevertheless was useful and in some ways meaningful to man. Instead of dismissing this nonempirical discourse as nonsense, Philosophy should treat it as a "language game" and-without passing...
Despite these agonies, or because of them-Wiener himself could not decide-the precocious child was reading ponderous books at the age of six. His shortsighted eyes almost went blind when he was eight, but he graduated from the Ayer, Mass., high school at twelve and got his B.A. from Tufts College at 15. Harvard gave him his doctorate in mathematics when he was 18 and kept him on as a lecturer...
...Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952 (paperback...
...remote from Madison Avenue in spirit as they are in miles are Philadelphia's N.W. Ayer & Son and its chairman, candid Harry Albert Batten, 65. Born four blocks from Ayer's 13-story headquarters on West Washington Square, Batten (no kin to B.B.D. & O.'s Co-Founder George Batten) still lives only eleven blocks from the office and walks to work each morning. His agency, an envied enigma in the industry, shuns the spectacular for quiet craftsmanship, e.g., its 23-year-old "A diamond is forever" campaign for De Beers, and selects its clients with as much...