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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69438 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

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).

Customer Reviews

Provocative and magnificent
Language, Truth and Logic was the book that got me into philosophy. It is a model of how we should write in the discipline - Ayer's prose is witty, fresh and crystal clear. Reading it is like being struck by a bolt from heaven - while Ayer wasn't expounding his own ideas, his is by far the best exposition of Logical Positivism and one of the best pieces of philosophical exposition ever written. Worth taking with a pinch of salt - Ayer was on the right lines, but in the final analysis this is too iconoclastic (as he himself eventually admitted). Still, if you want to read a book that will take you by the scruff of the neck, shake you vigorously and make you look at the world in a completely new way, then this is exactly what need.

Language is key
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.

A cult classic of analytical philosophy
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.