The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
A.J. AYEREven logical positivists are capable of love.
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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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 appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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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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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.
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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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