“... when one buys a pair of shoes, one is buying three things, the right shoe, the left shoe and the pair.”
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
“...the fact that a conclusion does not follow from its putative premise is not sufficient to show that it is false.”
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
“The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.”
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"Even logical positivists are capable of love."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"No moral system can rest solely on authority."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychology and sociology."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"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."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"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."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)
"There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed."
― Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)