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Language, Truth and Logic (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Product Description
Product Description
If you can't prove something, it is literally senseless - so argues Ayer in this irreverent and electrifying book. Statements are either true by definition (as in maths), or can be verified by direct experience. Ayer rejected metaphysical claims about god, the absolute, and objective values as completely nonsensical. Ayer was only 24 when he finished LANGUAGE, TRUTH & LOGIC, yet it shook the foundations of Anglo-American philosophy and made its author notorious. It became a classic text, cleared away the cobwebs in philosophical thinking, and has been enormously influential.
About the Author
Sir Alfred Ayer caused a furore with the publication of his LANGUAGE, TRUTH & LOGIC in 1936, when he was only 24. From 1959 until 1978 he was Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He died in 1989. Ben Rogers is the author of A. J.AYER: A LIFE (Chatto & Windus 1999, Vintage 2000).
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First Sentence
The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read Ayer's obituary in the Telegraph and he seemed like an interesting man, so I bought this book.
As a teenage layperson, I found it VERY heavy-going, I kept a dictionary nearby to refer to and my copy is littered with notes to myself on word meanings. It was worth the perseverance to discover so much. His debunking of inexact, ambiguous metaphysics really helped me to make the switch from being a wooley agnostic to a fully confirmed atheist.
Say what you like about positive optimism, it's Ayer's use and insistance of the importance of accuracy of meaning and expression in communication that I responded to.
This book modified my outlook on life and I have given away and bought the book 4 times now.
As a teenage layperson, I found it VERY heavy-going, I kept a dictionary nearby to refer to and my copy is littered with notes to myself on word meanings. It was worth the perseverance to discover so much. His debunking of inexact, ambiguous metaphysics really helped me to make the switch from being a wooley agnostic to a fully confirmed atheist.
Say what you like about positive optimism, it's Ayer's use and insistance of the importance of accuracy of meaning and expression in communication that I responded to.
This book modified my outlook on life and I have given away and bought the book 4 times now.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book, which landed like a bombshell in the philosophical world of the 1930s, remains a thought-provoking read. In it, Ayer posits his own brand of highly sceptical empiricism. In the first chapter he sweepingly characterizes most philosophical enquiry up to the time of writing as pointless, and many of its theories and preoccupations as meaningless. Whatever is not empirically verifiable cannot be commented on, and to do so, in Ayer's view, is to spout nonsense. While Ayer's youthful writing sometimes makes unwarranted leaps of reasoning that make him vulnerable to criticism (as his opponents certainly realized), its vigour is also refreshing among the dryness of most analytic philosophy. I recommend this unreservedly as a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in philosophy.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book expresses the core theory of Logical Positivism in its more developed form. In short: a factually significant proposition (i.e. a proposition that actually says something about the observable world) must be verifiable or falsifiable at least in principle, by some possible observations which would increase or decrease the probability of the propostion being true. The only other meaningful statements are tautologies, they say the same thing twice: a tautology is true of false in virtue of the defintions of terms used. Or put another way, in analytic language one may say anything they want and make up any defintions with the one condition that one may not contradict oneself. This doctrine (of logical positivism in general) derives from classic empiricism, which asserts that all knowledge of the world must derive solely from sense-data (using our 5 senses) and our human ability to conceptualise and organise such data.
From these claims, Ayer developes the emotivist theory of values and argues that literal assertions about God, of any supernatural entity, or of literally 'good' or 'evil' behaviour are literally senseless (they say nothing at all about the empirical world). Religious and moral language do, of course, have aethetic value in so much as they express how we feel about the world.
He also explains how Mathematical reasoning is possible and how Mathematically theories can be described as 'true' - Maths is a form of analytic reasoning so that a Mathematician may say anything he wants and define any symbol however he wants (i.e. lays down axioms and definitions) so long as he does not contradict himself. Theorums can be derived by carefully investigating what is implied by these axioms and defintions.
Language, Truth and Logic is not too long (it can be read in about 6 hours or so) but clearly and systematically developes a coherant account of human logic. Ayer answers many classic problems in Philosophy while at it - problems such as God, monism vs pluralism etc can often be reduced to meaninglessness. He attempts to answer the problem of whether there is any reason to believe in other minds, through analogy of observable body to unobservable mind, but he himself (in his introduction) admits that he had not resolved the dialema altogether (e.g. it may still be questioned why other material bodies may behave as humans without experiencing sensations like you yourself do [assuming you yourself have a mind!].)
This work ranks alongside Russell's 'Problems of Philosophy' and Russell and Whitehead's 'Principle's of Mathematics' as one of the key works of early 20th Century analytic philosophy; crucial to anyone with an interest in Philosophy (or to some extent any Science).
From these claims, Ayer developes the emotivist theory of values and argues that literal assertions about God, of any supernatural entity, or of literally 'good' or 'evil' behaviour are literally senseless (they say nothing at all about the empirical world). Religious and moral language do, of course, have aethetic value in so much as they express how we feel about the world.
He also explains how Mathematical reasoning is possible and how Mathematically theories can be described as 'true' - Maths is a form of analytic reasoning so that a Mathematician may say anything he wants and define any symbol however he wants (i.e. lays down axioms and definitions) so long as he does not contradict himself. Theorums can be derived by carefully investigating what is implied by these axioms and defintions.
Language, Truth and Logic is not too long (it can be read in about 6 hours or so) but clearly and systematically developes a coherant account of human logic. Ayer answers many classic problems in Philosophy while at it - problems such as God, monism vs pluralism etc can often be reduced to meaninglessness. He attempts to answer the problem of whether there is any reason to believe in other minds, through analogy of observable body to unobservable mind, but he himself (in his introduction) admits that he had not resolved the dialema altogether (e.g. it may still be questioned why other material bodies may behave as humans without experiencing sensations like you yourself do [assuming you yourself have a mind!].)
This work ranks alongside Russell's 'Problems of Philosophy' and Russell and Whitehead's 'Principle's of Mathematics' as one of the key works of early 20th Century analytic philosophy; crucial to anyone with an interest in Philosophy (or to some extent any Science).
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
An excellent premise but slightly repetitive
This a highly interesting book and provides another new approach to philosophy, language and life in general. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Bradley Barnes
pure genius
AJ Ayer is dead. Is there any philosopher in the world that would like to tell him otherwise?
Published on 13 Nov 2005 by Johnny
Of Antiquarian Interest Only...
Ayer's book was indeed groundbreaking - it made Logical Positivism the new cool topic in English philosophy. However, it now needs to be read with a healthy dose of scepticism. Read more
Published on 31 Oct 2003 by "hackloon"
Experience is seated at the head of the table in this work.
How can metaphysics be real if we cannot verify it? This is the maint question in which this book deals. Read more
Published on 12 Sep 2001 by Dr Stuart D. Jackson
Sense and Nonsense
Truth, Logic and Language presents an upbeat and passionate dissertation on the futility of metaphysical claims on God and absolute truth. Read more
Published on 13 May 2001
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