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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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. ...”