Word: ayers
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...Greenness of Grass. What had happened to Oxford-or that splinter of it that "Oxonian" had stubbed his toe on? "Oxonian" thought one man was largely to blame-a wan and wispy philosopher named Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer. Ayer's book, Language, Truth and Logic, had "acquired almost the status of a philosophic Bible" at Oxford. It insisted that "value judgments" of beauty and goodness were, philosophically speaking, nonsense. They were moral sentiments, not facts at all. Such heresies, "Oxonian" thought, left no place for human values, created the moral void fascism required...
...once the letters column of the New Statesman bristled with arguments pro & con Freddie Ayer. Did his philosophy really lead to fascism? One professional philosophizer who sided with "Oxonian" was bush-bearded C.E.M. Joad. To accept Ayer's assumptions, wrote Joad, would be to agree "that there is no meaning in the universe . . . that it means nothing to say that Beethoven is a greater musician than Mr. Sinatra . . . that all talk about God ... is twaddle...
...last month the argument went on. Readers argued about Ayer and surrealism, Ayer and mathematics, Ayer and the greenness of grass. One philosopher who paid little heed was Freddie Ayer himself. Last week, far from Oxford and the New Statesman, he was in the U.S., getting ready to teach courses at New York University...
...Agony of Philosophy. At 37, and with only two books to his credit, Freddie Ayer has become Britain's most discussed younger philosopher, the chief apostle of a school which its followers call "Logical Positivism." Freddie Ayer himself is a man who hates to get up in the morning and finds writing philosophy agony ("I smoke cigarette after cigarette, twirl my watch chain, and all that sort of thing"). The son of a small businessman, he made his way on scholarships through Eton ("I wasn't awfully happy there") and Oxford ("The people were much cleverer than...
...Freddie Ayer thinks that philosophy is scientific in temper, has no business preaching moral or esthetic precepts. There are only two sorts of meaningful statements, he says-those based on observable facts, and those which connect them by logic. In Ayer's philosophy, statements like "There is a God" are neither true nor false, since he regards them as unverifiable. It means nothing to say, "That man is good to support his mother." The fact is that the man supports his mother. Calling him good merely expresses an attitude towards the action...