A j ayer biography

A. J. Ayer
A Life
By BEN ROGERS
Grove Press

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Teachers, Bankers, Merchants, Wives

On the Abbey Road, in St John's Wood, right opposite the famous recording studio, there stands a pleasant six-storey block of red-brick mansion fiats: Neville Court. St John's Wood first became popular in the early part of the nineteenth century with the erection of Lord's cricket ground and street upon street of elegant late Georgian-style villas. The area's tone was lowered somewhat in the s and s by the construction of a couple of railway lines, but at the turn of the century it still retained its reputation as one of London's most desirable suburbs. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras the variety of its houses, the width of its tree-lined avenues and its proximity to the centre of the city attracted writers and artists from George Eliot to Edwin Landseer, as well as less notable representatives of the upper middle class. All that St John's Wood had against it, some said, was that it was terribly popular with wealthy Jews.

    Number 8 Neville Court is an airy three-bedroom, first-floor flat, with high ceilings and large french windows in the main rooms, leading out to little balconies. It was in this flat that Alfred Jules Ayer was born on 29 October , and here he was subject to the first of those formless, depthless sense-impressions that played such an important role in his later philosophy. An adult, he would say, is just a child who has learned to give order to the chair scrapings, breast patterns, hunger pangs, and milky flavours of the crib. Ayer's birth was difficult: it seems that his mother, Reine Ayer, was unable to have any more children, so he remained an only child. Reine was around twenty-three at the time, her husband, Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer, twenty years older. They had been married for just over a year.

    Ayer could remember very little of hi

English philosopher (–)

Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" AyerFBA (AIR; 29 October – 27 June ) was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic () and The Problem of Knowledge ().

Ayer was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From to he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.

During the Second World War Ayer was a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent.

Ayer was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from until , after which he returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from to and knighted in He was known for his advocacy of humanism, and was the second president of the British Humanist Association (now known as Humanists UK).

Ayer was president of the Homosexual Law Reform Society for a time; he remarked, "as a notorious heterosexual I could never be accused of feathering my own nest."

Life

Ayer was born in St John's Wood, in north west London, to Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer and Reine (née Citroen), wealthy parents from continental Europe. His mother was from the Dutch-Jewish family that founded the Citroën car company in France; his father was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family, including for their bank and as secretary to Alfred Rothschild.

Ayer was educated at Ascham St Vincent's School, a former boarding preparatory school for boys in the seaside town of Eastbourne in Sussex, where he started boarding at the relatively early age of seven for reasons to do with the First World War, and at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar. At Eton Ayer first became known for his characteristic bra

Sir Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer (better known as Alfred Ayer or A. J. Ayer) ( - ) was a 20th Century British philosopher in the Analytic Philosophy tradition, mainly known for his promotion of Logical Positivism and for popularizing the movement's ideas in Britain.

He saw himself as continuing in the British Empiricist tradition of Locke and Hume and more contemporary philosophers like Bertrand Russell, and is often considered second only to Russell among British philosophers of the 20th Century in the depth of his philosophical knowledge.

Alfred Ayer was born on 29 October in London, England, into a wealthy family of continental origin. His mother, Reine, was from a Dutch-Jewish family; his father, Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist. He grew up in the well-to-do St. John's Wood area of London, and was educated at the exclusive Ascham St. Vincent preparatory school for boys at Eastbourne, and then at even more prestigious Eton College.

A precocious but mischievous child, Ayer always felt himself to be something of an outsider. From an early age, he tried to convert his fellow students to Atheism, and at the age of 16 he started to show a serious interest in philosophy, duly impressed by his reading of Bertrand Russell's "Sceptical Essays" and G. E. Moore's "Principia Ethica".

In , he won a classics scholarship to Christ Church College at the University of Oxford, where one of his philosophy tutors, Gilbert Ryle ( - ), introduced him to Wittgenstein's "Tractatus". Ryle, who became a major figure in the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement, also enabled the young Alfred to study for a time with Moritz Schlick ( - ), then leader of the influential Vienna Circle, out of which the Logical Positivism movement grew. From to , he was a lecturer and research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.

During World War II, Ayer served in the British military, working