sweet effay

Had to teach Ayer to my AS level rel studies kids yesterday. They weren't very impressed, but perhaps that's because we only had enough time to spend twenty minutes on it (perhaps this is already far too long). I think you should write a full report of your feelings on the book when you're through - you don't write enough about philosophy on your blog, PhD boy!

My feelings about Ayer have not been changed by another waltz through Language Truth and Logic: His criticisms of metaphysics certainly bite against his initial definition of metaphysics as something which deals with a transcendent realm, however I think that there is more to metaphysics than this and, as Heidegger and Derrida show over and over again, it is not as easy to eliminate metaphysics as Ayer thinks (obviously you don't have to go to H & D to discover this, but they're the sort of people who would piss Ayer off to be used as ammunition against him). Whatever else he might claim, I find his view of philosophy far too reductive, and I suspect that he only wanted to retain the title in order to ensure that he could still get jobs in philosophy departments. He's obviously correct about absolute verification of the empirical being impossible, but I don't see why that makes the problem of induction nonsensical: Just because something cannot be solved, does not mean that it is not interesting, e.g. if Hume hadn't spent so much time working on induction, Ayer wouldn't have had half as much to say on the matter. I'm sympathetic to his attack on rationalism, although I remain to be convinced that all the necessary truths of mathematics are tautological; basically because it seems to entail that you there is a bloody big equation somewhere out of which you can derive the whole lot of them.

I must say that I'm appalled that Ayer is on the A level syllabus because:
1. He's bloody difficult.
2. If there is anything likely to put the majority of students off studying philosophy (especially the history of philosophy), it is reading Ayer.

Can I go back to posting pictures of Playmobil now?

You need to imitate everything. Trust me.