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.
A.J. AYERWe shall maintain that no statement which refers to a ‘reality’transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.
A.J. AYERWe 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.
A.J. AYERI 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. AYERWhy should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
A.J. AYERI 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. AYERIt seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
A.J. AYERIt appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
A.J. AYERBut if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
A.J. AYERIf 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. AYERWhile moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
A.J. AYERThe 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. AYERThere 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. AYEREven logical positivists are capable of love.
A.J. AYERThe traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
A.J. AYERNo morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. AYERTheism 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