Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 55 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Here’s to the high-minded

Stefan Collini, 7 April 1994

After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain 
edited by Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler.
Routledge, 265 pp., £40, February 1994, 0 415 07056 2
Show More
Show More
... if one concentrated on, say, Bertrand Russell, G.M. Trevelyan, R.H. Tawney, A.D. Lindsay, A.J. Ayer. The danger in a predominantly policy-centred approach is that it will perpetuate the familiar philistinism of political historians, for whom intellectuals only ‘matter’ when they directly affect political outcomes. Most of the contributors to After the ...

Grisly Creed

Patrick Collinson: John Wyclif, 22 February 2007

John Wyclif: Myth and Reality 
by G.R. Evans.
Lion, 320 pp., £20, October 2005, 0 7459 5154 6
Show More
Show More
... and Ockham, and would be welcome in the company of more recent Oxford philosophers such as A.J. Ayer. McFarlane’s book comes alive when Wyclif enters the world of late 14th-century politics. It was a confused world, trying to cope with the second childhood of Edward III and, with the Black Prince given a terminal prognosis, bracing itself for the first ...

Short Books on Great Men

John Dunn, 22 May 1980

Jesus 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Oxford, 102 pp., June 1980, 0 19 283016 3
Show More
Aquinas 
by Anthony Kenny.
Oxford, 86 pp., June 1980, 0 19 287500 0
Show More
Pascal 
by Alban Krailsheimer.
Oxford, 84 pp., June 1980, 0 19 287512 4
Show More
Hume 
by A.J. Ayer.
Oxford, 102 pp., June 1980, 0 19 287528 0
Show More
Marx 
by Peter Singer.
Oxford, 82 pp., June 1980, 0 19 287510 8
Show More
Show More
... can be an acceptable substitute for showing exactly how it can be derived. With Professor Ayer’s Hume we are back in calmer waters. Written with predictably impressive skill and verve and graced by a generous selection of Hume’s own marvellously elegant ironies, it will no doubt give pleasure as well as instruction to many. When set beside Dr ...

Just Like Cookham

Neal Ascherson: Stanley Spencer in China, 19 May 2011

Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 591 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 954193 5
Show More
Show More
... immune to lying propaganda; his vivid journal of the trip is one of Wright’s best sources. A.J. Ayer, preacher of logical positivism, was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in the Communist Party, although his Party discipline was constantly threatened by his merry sense of the absurd (he ...

True Words

A.D. Nuttall, 25 April 1991

The Names of Comedy 
by Anne Barton.
Oxford, 221 pp., £22.50, August 1990, 0 19 811793 0
Show More
Show More
... as if the mere attribution of meaning to a name stamps one a cratylist. But hermogeneans like A.J. Ayer have no difficulty in seeing how names, arbitrarily started, may acquire in time a certain force or resonance. Moreover, a proper name may be formed from a pre-existing adjective (‘Subtle’), in which case it can create expectations which may or may not ...

No More Scissors and Paste

Mary Beard: R.G. Collingwood, 25 March 2010

History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood 
by Fred Inglis.
Princeton, 385 pp., £23.95, 0 691 13014 0
Show More
Show More
... old-fashioned as it must have seemed by the mid-1930s to those who were starting to listen to A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin. The summers he devoted to digging, and to transcribing, recording and drawing Roman inscriptions (from tombstones to milestones), in preparation for a complete collection of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain – a project on which he worked ...

Like a Top Hat

Jonathan Rée: Morality without the Metaphysics, 8 February 2024

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography 
by Émile Perreau-Saussine, translated by Nathan J. Pinkoski.
Notre Dame, 197 pp., £36, September 2022, 978 0 268 20325 2
Show More
Show More
... he sneaked off to University College London to hear the positivist polemics of A.J. Ayer, who maintained that there was nothing to morality except emotion. He also made a trip to Paris, where he learned about Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist doctrine that our characters are the product of our unconstrained choices. He noticed that ...

Plato’s Friend

Ian Hacking, 17 December 1992

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 520 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 7011 3998 6
Show More
Show More
... in Oxford were friends of Aristotle, and they hardly get a look in. The exception is the late A.J. Ayer, whose cameo appearance is just right. ‘I first read Ayer’s book’ – Language, Truth and Logic – ‘in 1940 when I began to study philosophy and was, together with many others, amazed and impressed by the ...

Conversations with Rorty

Paul Seabright, 16 June 1983

Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 
by Richard Rorty.
Harvester, 237 pp., £22.50, February 1983, 0 7108 0403 2
Show More
Show More
... thing which has an essence.’ James has frequently been misunderstood in this regard (though A.J. Ayer in The Origins of Pragmatism also pointed to his anti-essentialism), and Rorty goes on to urge an abandonment of our conception of philosophy’s task as being the discovery of essences at all. It is an attractive view, although if pushed to its limit it ...

Little Lame Balloonman

August Kleinzahler: E.E. Cummings, 9 October 2014

E.E. Cummings: The Complete Poems, 1904-62 
edited by George James Firmage.
Liveright, 1102 pp., £36, September 2013, 978 0 87140 710 8
Show More
E.E. Cummings: A Life 
by Susan Cheever.
Pantheon, 209 pp., £16, February 2014, 978 0 307 37997 9
Show More
Show More
... over Cummings, also from time to time sought comfort in the arms of strangers (including A.J. Ayer, which did not please the anti-Semitic Cummings). Cheever’s book is written in a style reminiscent of a Vanity Fair article and she is clueless about poetry, but the book moves along briskly. Its principal virtue is its brevity. There are already a number ...

The Young Man One Hopes For

Jonathan Rée: The Wittgensteins, 21 November 2019

Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Peter Winslow.
Bloomsbury, 300 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 4742 9813 1
Show More
Show More
... or less united in seeing Wittgenstein as a burnt-out wreck and a disgrace to the profession: A.J. Ayer, for example, described him as a maniacal egotist who took refuge within a ‘cénacle of the faithful’, and Isaiah Berlin thought he had been reduced to peddling some trashy variety of ‘imaginative romanticism’. The gossip did not cease with ...

Sociology in Cambridge

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 6 November 1986

... It had even affected the Marxists there. But it had been born again off Regent Steet, where A.J. Ayer wrote Language, Truth and Logic, and naturalised. (And meanwhile, it had fled its native city. Its most fantastical progeny, the Encyclopaedia of the Unified Sciences, issued, although stillborn, in Chicago.) The more avowedly self-made conceptions that ...

Bardic

Richard Wollheim, 22 June 1995

Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society 
by Meyer Schapiro.
Braziller, 253 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 0 8076 1356 8
Show More
Show More
... team, which consisted of Ernest Nagel, the philosopher of science at Columbia, and A.J. Ayer, represented positivism de pur sang. In addition to these painstaking analyses, the essay contains the suggestion that the most fruitful way of looking at any theory of unity is to regard it, not as making a claim about how works of art are or should be, but ...

Leader of the Martians

Thomas Nagel: J.L. Austin’s War, 7 September 2023

J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer 
by M.W. Rowe.
Oxford, 660 pp., £30, May, 978 0 19 870758 5
Show More
Show More
... only gradually. In 1936 he and Berlin formed a discussion group of young dons that included A.J. Ayer, whose vivid brief for logical positivism in Language, Truth and Logic had made him a celebrity. Austin resisted. In a negative vein that would become characteristic, he insisted that positivism oversimplified both language and human knowledge, which were ...

What is rude?

Thomas Nagel: Midgley, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, 10 February 2022

The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics 
by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb.
Oxford, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 19 754107 4
Show More
Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life 
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
Chatto, 398 pp., £25, February, 978 1 78474 328 4
Show More
Show More
... the main philosophical theme of both books.The revolution had been launched before the war. A.J. Ayer, encouraged by his teacher Gilbert Ryle, had gone to Austria to learn about the ideas of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists and logicians who were developing the position known as logical positivism. ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences