No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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.
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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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.
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
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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.
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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.
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
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There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis – about the meaning of what we say – and there is all of this … all of life.
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But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
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It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
A.J. AYER