It spurred a widespread emphasis on linguistic analysis in philosophy.Ī 1957 article in The Observer of London said that the movement that Sir Alfred pioneered in Britain ''ranges widely between the ideas of Bertrand Russell and those of Wittgenstein,'' the German philosopher of language. The philosophy, which was also known as scientific empiricism, held that statements in principle that could not be verified by experience were meaningless, and sought to apply the exactness and the methods of the natural sciences and mathematics to the work of philosophers. He wrote the influential book ''Language, Truth and Logic,'' published in 1936, which came to be regarded as the basic English-language work on logical positivism. Ayer, was knighted in 1970 during his two decades as Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University.Īfter doing brilliantly as an Oxford undergraduate, he was exposed to logical positivism in 1932 in Vienna, where he sat in on meetings of the Vienna School of philosophers, mathematicians and other scholars. Sir Alfred, who was known professionally as A. Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, the British philosopher who did much to introduce the school of philosophy known as logical positivism to his English-speaking colleagues, died Tuesday at University College Hospital in London after long suffering from a respiratory ailment.
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