31+ A.J. Ayer Quotes On Education, A Quote And Logical

A.J. Ayer was a British philosopher who was a leading figure in the school of logical positivism. He is best known for his book Language, Truth, and Logic, which set out the verification principle, which states that a statement is only meaningful if it can be verified by experience. He also wrote extensively on the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Following is our collection on famous quotes by A.J. Ayer on education, life, love.

Top 10 A.J. Ayer Quotes

1. No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
2. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
3. Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
4. No moral system can rest solely on authority.
5. We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.
6. While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
7. I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
8. Even logical positivists are capable of love.
9. It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
10. It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

A.J. Ayer Famous Quotes And Sayings

I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it. — A.J. Ayer

If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance. — A.J. Ayer

The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs. — A.J. Ayer

The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself. — A.J. Ayer

If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. — A.J. Ayer

The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity. — A.J. Ayer

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible. — A.J. Ayer

If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had endangered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity. — A.J. Ayer

It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience. — A.J. Ayer

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed. — A.J. Ayer

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved. — A.J. Ayer

The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies. — A.J. Ayer

Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man. — A.J. Ayer

A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists. — A.J. Ayer

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable. — A.J. Ayer

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science. — A.J. Ayer

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. — A.J. Ayer

I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before. — A.J. Ayer

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life. — A.J. Ayer

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. — A.J. Ayer

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts. — A.J. Ayer

Life Lessons by A.J. Ayer

A.J. Ayer's work can teach us about the importance of logical thinking and the power of language. He believed that knowledge can be acquired through empirical evidence and logical reasoning, and that our language should be used to express meaningful and accurate statements. His work also suggests that we should be open to questioning our own beliefs and assumptions, and be willing to challenge accepted ideas.