||boek: Hume|vertaling: Willem Visser|Lemniscaat-Kopstukken Filosofie

||door: A.J. Ayer

||taal: nl
||jaar: 2003
||druk: 4e druk
||pag.: 136p
||opm.: softcover|zo goed als nieuw

||isbn: 90-5637-234-3
||code: 1:000549

--- Over het boek (foto 1): Hume ---

Een reeks toegankelijke inleidingen in het leven en denken van sleutelfiguren uit de geschiedenis van de westerse filosofie, die onze cultuur blijvend hebben beïnvloed.

David Hume (1711-1776) is een van de grootste Engelse filosofen en werd reeds tijdens zijn leven beschouwd als een sleutelfiguur van de Verlichting. Hume's 'naturalistische' benadering van een breed scala van filosofische onderwerpen resulteerde in bijzonder originele theorieën over waarneming, persoonlijke identiteit, causaliteit, ethiek, politiek en religie. Al deze onderwerpen komen in deze inleiding aan de orde, geschreven door A.J. Ayer, zelf een van de belangrijkste filosofen van de twintigste eeuw.

[bron: https--www.bol.com]

De gezaghebbende Britse filosoof Ayer opent met een uitgebreide opsomming van de levensloop van zijn grote voorganger Hume (1711-1776), en maakt vervolgens duidelijk dat Hume beweert dat de menselijke rede niet bij machte is om te bewijzen dat er een wereld buiten onze geest bestaat of dat er een God is. Terecht veel aandacht krijgt Humes opvatting over causaliteit: een noodzakelijke band tussen oorzaak en gevolg is niet aan te tonen. Alles wat bestaat is opeenvolging, de rest is gewenning. In een te kort hoofdstuk worden dan Humes opvattingen over moraal besproken. Ayer voelt zich erg verwant met Humes standpunten. Dat is goed te merken. Hij verdedigt Hume, soms tegen beter weten in. Het boek is duidelijk geschreven.

[bron: nbd biblion]

Kopstukken filosofie

In november verschenen de eerste vijf delen in de serie "Kopstukken filosofie", vertalingen uit de Engelse reeks "Past Masters" die eind jaren zeventig, begin jaren tachtig bij Oxford University Press verscheen. "Die herkomst heeft consequenties. Geen Frankfurters, geen grote Franse filosofen, geen Amerikanen: er is sprake van een duidelijk Engelse selectie - al hebben ze Locke vergeten, dat kunnen ze als Engelsen toch eigenlijk niet doen...

Wat toegankelijkheid betreft zijn er binnen deze serie grote verschillen. In het deel over Montaigne geeft de historicus Peter Burke een helder beeld van de mens, zijn tijd en zijn denkbeelden. Ook de delen over Marx en Plato zijn uitstekend leesbaar. Maar het boek van A. J. Ayer over Hume is gebaseerd op vier lezingen voor een universitair publiek. Dat is pittig, heel pittig, als je in aanmerking neemt dat dit bedoeld is voor een algemene, niet-gespecialiseerde lezer, voor een eerste kennismaking dus. Ook het deel over Wittgenstein biedt stevige kost, maar dat kan bijna niet anders, dat is gegeven met de persoon van Wittgenstein.

De verschillende delen zijn geschreven door specialisten, en dat is uitstekend merkbaar. Eigenlijk vind ik dit een mooie serie. Mijn enige kanttekening is dat de auteurs, zelfs als ze niet uitdrukkelijk commentaar geven, toch hun geestelijke verwantschap met de filosoof verraden. Daar waar karikaturen worden geschetst van de theologie, zou ik meer afstand willen nemen.

In de serie "Kopstukken filosofie" van uitgeverij Lemniscaat (Rotterdam) verschenen delen over Plato, Montaigne, Hume, Marx en Wittgenstein (110 à 160 blz. en 24, 90 per deel). Op het programma staan dit voorjaar Aquino, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche en Heidegger, terwijl Socrates, Aristoteles, Berkeley, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer en Russell in de toekomst eveneens aan bod komen.

[bron: https--www.digibron.nl/viewer/collectie/Digibron/id/tag:RD.nl,20000112:newsml_98e40bb912f21b596a730229c630a00e]

--- Over (foto 2): A.J. Ayer ---

Alfred Jules Ayer (Londen, 29 oktober 1910 - Londen, 27 juni 1989), beter bekend als simpelweg A.J. Ayer (en Freddie genoemd door vrienden), was een filosoof die hielp het logisch positivisme te populariseren in Engelstalige landen door middel van zijn boeken Taal, waarheid en logica (1936) en Het probleem van kennis (1956).

Ayer woonde in Eton en studeerde de 'Greats' (de Klassieken) aan de Universiteit van Oxford. Daarna verbleef hij een jaar te Wenen, waar hij zich met name in de filosofie van de Wiener Kreis verdiepte. Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog diende hij in het Britse leger en de MI6. In menig opzicht was hij de filosofische opvolger van Bertrand Russell, hoewel hij meer bekendheid bereikte door het aanpassen van ideeën van anderen dan door ware originaliteit. Hij is misschien het bekendst om zijn controleprincipe, een poging tot het creëren van een proces om te bepalen of een zin een logische betekenis heeft. Kort voor zijn dood in 1989 ontving hij publiciteit na het hebben van een ongebruikelijke bijna-doodervaring.

Bibliografie (selectie)

• 1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz. (2nd edition, 1946.)
• 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
• 1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays over vrijheid, fenomenologie, basisproposities, utilitarisme, andere geesten, het verleden, ontologie.)
• 1957, "The conception of probability as a logical relation", in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
• 1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
• 1963, The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays over waarheid, privacy en private talen, natuurwetten, het concept van een persoon, waarschijnlijkheid.) (Ned. vert. Over de persoonlijkheid: wijsgerige opstellen, Utrecht, 1966)
• 1967, "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Data Theory?" Synthese vol. XVIII, pp. 117-40. (Herdrukt in Ayer 1969).
• 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan.
• 1969, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London: Macmillan. (Essays over kennis, de mens als onderwerp van de wetenschap, kans, filosofie en politiek, existentialisme, metafysica, en een antwoord aan Austin over sense-data theory [Ayer 1967].)
• 1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan.
• 1972a, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan.
• 1972b, Bertrand Russell, London: Fontana. (Ned. vert., Utrecht, 1974)
• 1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld. (Ned. vert. De kernproblemen van de filosofie, Kampen, 1987)
• 1979, "Replies", in G. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Voorgesteld aan A. J. Ayer, Met zijn Antwoorden, London: Macmillan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
• 1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Ned. vert., Rotterdam, 1999)
• 1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld. (Ned. vert. Filosofie in de twintigste eeuw, Kampen, 1986)
• 1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin.
• 1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins.
• 1984, More of My Life, London: Collins.

[bron: wikipedia]

Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer FBA (29 October 1910 - 27 June 1989), usually cited as A. J. Ayer, was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956).

He 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 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.

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

He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959, after which he returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 and knighted in 1970. He was known for his advocacy of humanism, and was the second President of the British Humanist Association (now known as Humanists UK).

Life

Ayer was born in St John's Wood, in north west London, to a wealthy family from continental Europe. His mother, Reine Citroën, was from the Dutch-Jewish family who founded the Citroën car company in France. His father, Jules Ayer, was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.

Ayer was educated at Ascham St Vincent's School, a former boarding preparatory school for boys in the seaside town of Eastbourne in Sussex, in which he started boarding at the comparatively early age of seven for reasons to do with the First World War, and Eton College. It was at Eton that Ayer first became known for his characteristic bravado and precocity. Although primarily interested in furthering his intellectual pursuits, he was very keen on sports, particularly rugby, and reputedly played the Eton Wall Game very well. In the final examinations at Eton, Ayer came second in his year, and first in classics. In his final year, as a member of Eton's senior council, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the abolition of corporal punishment at the school. He won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford.

After graduation from Oxford Ayer spent a year in Vienna, returned to England and published his first book, Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. The first exposition in English of logical positivism as newly developed by the Vienna Circle, this made Ayer at age 26 the 'enfant terrible' of British philosophy. In the Second World War he served as an officer in the Welsh Guards, chiefly in intelligence (Special Operations Executive (SOE) and MI6). Ayer was commissioned second lieutenant into the Welsh Guards from Officer Cadet Training Unit on 21 September 1940.

After the war he briefly returned to the University of Oxford where he became a fellow and Dean of Wadham College. He thereafter taught philosophy at London University from 1946 until 1959, when he also started to appear on radio and television. He was an extrovert and social mixer who liked dancing and attending the clubs in London and New York. He was also obsessed with sport: he had played rugby for Eton, and was a noted cricketer and a keen supporter of Tottenham Hotspur football team, where he was for many years a season ticket holder. For an academic, Ayer was an unusually well-connected figure in his time, with close links to 'high society' and the establishment. Presiding over Oxford high-tables, he is often described as charming, but at times he could also be intimidating.

Ayer was married four times to three women. His first marriage was from 1932-1941 to (Grace Isabel) Renée (d. 1980), who subsequently married philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Ayer's friend and colleague. In 1960 he married Alberta Constance (Dee) Wells, with whom he had one son. Ayer's marriage to Wells was dissolved in 1983 and that same year he married Vanessa Salmon, former wife of politician Nigel Lawson. She died in 1985 and in 1989 he remarried Dee Wells, who survived him. Ayer also had a daughter with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham Westbrook.

From 1959 to his retirement in 1978, Sir Alfred held the Wykeham Chair, Professor of Logic at Oxford. He was knighted in 1970. After his retirement, Ayer taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer reportedly asked, "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied, "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men". Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, allowing Campbell to slip out. Ayer was also involved in politics being involved in anti-Vietnam War activism, supporting the Labour Party (and then later the Social Democratic Party), Chairman of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Sport, and President of the Homosexual Law Reform Society.

In 1988, a year before his death, Ayer wrote an article entitled, "What I saw when I was dead", describing an unusual near-death experience. Of the experience, Ayer first said that it "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be." However, a few weeks later he revised this, saying "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief".

Ayer died on 27 June 1989. From 1980 to 1989 Ayer lived at 51 York Street, Marylebone, where a memorial plaque was unveiled on 19 November 1995.

Philosophical ideas

In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer presents the verification principle as the only valid basis for philosophy. Unless logical or empirical verification is possible, statements like "God exists" or "charity is good" are not true or untrue but meaningless, and may thus be excluded or ignored. Religious language in particular was unverifiable and as such literally nonsense. He also criticises C. A. Mace's opinion that metaphysics is a form of intellectual poetry. The stance that a belief in "God" denotes no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as igtheism (for example, by Paul Kurtz). In later years Ayer reiterated that he did not believe in God and began to refer to himself as an atheist. He followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston on the topic of religion.

Ayer's version of emotivism divides "the ordinary system of ethics" into four classes:

• "Propositions that express definitions of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions"
• "Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes"
• "Exhortations to moral virtue"
• "Actual ethical judgments"

He focuses on propositions of the first class-moral judgments-saying that those of the second class belong to science, those of the third are mere commands, and those of the fourth (which are considered in normative ethics as opposed to meta-ethics) are too concrete for ethical philosophy.

Ayer argues that moral judgments cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees with ethical intuitionists. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition of non-empirical moral truths as "worthless" since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":

• The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money." In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, "You stole that money," in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. ... If now I generalise my previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence that has no factual meaning-that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false. ... I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments.

Between 1945 and 1947, together with Russell and George Orwell, he contributed a series of articles to Polemic, a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.

Ayer was closely associated with the British humanist movement. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostics' Adoption Society and in the same year succeeded Julian Huxley as president of the British Humanist Association, a post he held until 1970. In 1968 he edited The Humanist Outlook, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism. In addition he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.

Works

Ayer is best known for popularising the verification principle, in particular through his presentation of it in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). The principle was at the time at the heart of the debates of the so-called Vienna Circle which Ayer visited as a young guest. Others, including the leading light of the circle, Moritz Schlick, were already offering their own papers on the issue. Ayer's own formulation was that a sentence can be meaningful only if it has verifiable empirical import; otherwise, it is either "analytical" if tautologous or "metaphysical" (i.e. meaningless, or "literally senseless"). He started to work on the book at the age of 23 and it was published when he was 26. Ayer's philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by those of the Vienna Circle and David Hume. His clear, vibrant and polemical exposition of them makes Language, Truth and Logic essential reading on the tenets of logical empiricism; the book is regarded as a classic of 20th century analytic philosophy, and is widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In it, Ayer also proposed that the distinction between a conscious man and an unconscious machine resolves itself into a distinction between "different types of perceptible behaviour", an argument that anticipates the Turing test published in 1950 to test a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence.

Ayer wrote two books on the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy of David Hume and a short biography of Voltaire.

Ayer was a strong critic of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. As a logical positivist Ayer was in conflict with Heidegger's proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence. These he felt were completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis, and this sort of philosophy an unfortunate strain in modern thought. He considered Heidegger to be the worst example of such philosophy, which Ayer believed to be entirely useless. In Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) Ayer accuses Heidegger of "surprising ignorance" or "unscrupulous distortion" and "what can fairly be described as charlatanism."

In 1972-1973 Ayer gave the Gifford Lectures at University of St Andrews, later published as The Central Questions of Philosophy. In the preface to the book, he defends his selection to hold the lectureship on the basis that Lord Gifford wished to promote "natural theology", in the widest sense of that term", and that non-believers are allowed to give the lectures if they are "able reverent men, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth". He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called "philosophy"-including the whole of metaphysics, theology and aesthetics-were not matters that could be judged as being true or false and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them.

In The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963), Ayer heavily criticized Wittgenstein's private language argument.

Ayer's sense-data theory in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow Oxonian J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of common language philosophy. Ayer responded to this in the essay "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-datum Theory?", which can be found in his Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969).

Awards

He was awarded a Knighthood as Knight Bachelor in the London Gazette on 1 January 1970.

Selected publications

• 1936, Language, Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz. (2nd ed., 1946.) OCLC 416788667 Reprinted 2001 with a new introduction, London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-118604-7
• 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan. OCLC 2028651
• 1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on freedom, phenomenalism, basic propositions, utilitarianism, other minds, the past, ontology.) OCLC 186636305
• 1957, "The conception of probability as a logical relation", in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
• 1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan. OCLC 557578816
• 1957, "Logical Positivism - A Debate" (with F. C. Copleston) in: Edwards, Paul, Pap, Arthur (eds.), A Modern Introduction to Philosophy; readings from classical and contemporary sources
• 1963, The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on truth, privacy and private languages, laws of nature, the concept of a person, probability.) OCLC 3573935
• 1967, "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Data Theory?" Synthese vol. XVIII, pp. 117-140. (Reprinted in Ayer 1969).
• 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan. OCLC 641463982
• 1969, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London: Macmillan. (Essays on knowledge, man as a subject for science, chance, philosophy and politics, existentialism, metaphysics, and a reply to Austin on sense-data theory [Ayer 1967].) ISBN 978-0-333-10517-7
• 1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan. OCLC 464766212
• 1972, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-12756-8
• 1972, Russell, London: Fontana Modern Masters. OCLC 186128708
• 1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld. ISBN 978-0-297-76634-6
• 1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-216017-9
• 1979, "Replies", in G. F. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, With His Replies, London: Macmillan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
• 1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld.
• 1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1984, More of My Life, London: Collins.
• 1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin.
• 1986, Voltaire, New York: Random House.
• 1988, Thomas Paine, London: Secker & Warburg.
• 1989, "That undiscovered country", New Humanist, Vol. 104 (1), May, pp. 10-13.
• 1990, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• 1991, "A Defense of Empiricism" in: Griffiths, A. Phillips (ed.), A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements). Cambridge University Press.
• 1992, "Intellectual Autobiography" and Repiies in: Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer (The Library of Living Philosophers Volume XXI), edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, Open Court Publishing Co.

[source: wikipedia]

A.J. Ayer (1910-1989) was only 24 when he wrote the book that made his philosophical name, Language, Truth, and Logic (hereafter LTL), published in 1936. In it he put forward what were understood to be the major theses of logical positivism, and so established himself as the leading English representative of the movement, Viennese in origin. In endorsing these views Ayer saw himself as continuing in the line of British empiricism established by John Locke and David Hume, an empiricism whose most recent representative was Bertrand Russell. Throughout his subsequent career he remained true to this tradition's rejection of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, and so he saw the method of philosophy to be the analysis of the meaning of key terms, such as 'causality', 'truth', 'knowledge', 'freedom', and so on. The major portion of his work was devoted to exploring different facets of our claims to knowledge, particularly perceptual knowledge and knowledge that depended on inductive inference for its credence. Along the way he defended a 'justified true belief' account of knowledge, a Humean account of causation, and compatibilism with respect to freedom. In LTL he put forward an emotivist theory of ethics, one that he never abandoned.

Ayer always wrote with stylish crispness and clarity; he could lay bare the bones of a philosophical difficulty in a few paragraphs of strikingly simple prose. On many a philosophical problem Ayer cannot be bettered for providing a lucid, informative, and revealing description of its contours. Above all, on reading an essay of his, whether it be on basic propositions, sense data, induction, or freedom, one comes away recognizing that the aim of the author has been to reach the truth, no matter what that turned out to be. Unfortunately, he sometimes rushed to reach it, which, together with the directness of his style, gave him a reputation for mere cleverness that he never lived down. Nevertheless, amongst British philosophers of the 20th Century he has been ranked as second only to Russell (Foster 1985); P.F. Strawson, at his memorial service, stated that his contribution to the theory of knowledge and general metaphysics was "in no way inferior to Russell's" (see Rogers 1999, 358).

...

[source: https--plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/]