A.J. Ayer

A.J. Ayer was the British philosopher who imported logical positivism from Vienna to England and made it famous with his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic — one of the most aggressively argued and widely read philosophical works of the twentieth century. Written when he was twenty-five, it declared that any statement that cannot be verified by experience or by logic is strictly meaningless — sweeping away metaphysics, theology, and much of traditional ethics in a single stroke.

Ayer later qualified the verification principle but remained one of analytic philosophy's most combative defenders, engaging with critics and the public throughout his long career. His later work developed a sophisticated empiricist theory of knowledge in The Problem of Knowledge and The Central Questions of Philosophy. A celebrated intellectual celebrity, Ayer was the public face of British analytic philosophy for half a century, appearing regularly on television and in the national press.