AYER, SIR A.J.

born Oct. 29, 1910, London, Eng. died June 27, 1989, London in full Sir Alfred Jules Ayer British educator and philosopher, a proponent of logical positivism. His seminal work, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), became widely read and debated. Ayer graduated from Eton College and from Christ Church, Oxford (B.A., 1932; M.A., 1936). He was exposed to logical positivism in 1932 during a stay in Vienna. He began teaching at the University of Oxford in 1932 and served in military intelligence during World War II. Elected a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, in 1944, Ayer was named dean in 1945. From 1946 he was a professor and dean of the Arts Faculty at University College, London; but he returned in 1959 to Oxford, where he was Wykeham professor of logic and fellow of New College until 1978 and fellow of Wolfson College in 197883. Ayer gained international notice in 1936 with his first book, Language, Truth and Logic (rev. ed., 1946). He drew on the ideas of the Vienna Circle and built on the British empirical tradition of David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and G.E. Moore. Statements that cannot be verified by experience were nonsense, in his viewwithout philosophical significance. He put forward linguistic analysis as the method for clarifying empirical truth. His interests are reflected in the titles of his publications: The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), The Problem of Knowledge (1956), The Origins of Pragmatism (1968), Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage (1971), The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973), and Wittgenstein (1985). His autobiography was published in two volumes as Part of My Life (1977) and More of My Life (1984). He was named a fellow of the British Academy in 1952 and was knighted in 1970.