But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
A.J. AYEREven logical positivists are capable of love.
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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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.
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I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
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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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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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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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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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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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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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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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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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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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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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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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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.
A.J. AYER