Books by A.J. Ayer

Featuring a detailed introduction from Professor A.J. Ayer, the concepts and main ideas of logical positivism and its revolutionary theories and explained and discussed in this bibliography featuring several classic papers in English for the first time.Edited by a A.J. Ayer, Logical Positivism offers?in the words of the movement's founders?revolutionary theories on meaning and metaphysics, the nature of logic and mathematics, the foundations of knowledge, the content of psychological propositions, ethics, sociology, and the nature of philosophy itself. In the pages of this book, readers will find classic papers by Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, and Hanh published for the first time in English. In the most complete bibliography on the subject, Logical Positivism explains the movement's main ideas and their impact on contemporary philosophy in Britain and the United States.

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.