A. J. Ayer: A Life - Softcover

Rogers, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099536811 ISBN 13: 9780099536819

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Freddie Ayer (1910-89) was one of the most influential philosophers of his generation, while his television and radio appearances made him Britain's first 'media philosopher'. Ben Rogers relates Ayer's ideas to his remarkable life, strangely troubled beneath its glamorous surface. A friend of Isaiah Berlin, and a follower first of Bertrand Russell, and then of Wittgenstein, Ayer won fame at 24 with his brilliantly iconclastic LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC - an essential text for students ever since. Rogers shows Ayer at work and also at play, as a passionate follower of cricket and football, a great dancer, a lover of witty conversation and beautful women. Married four times, Ayer was a leading figure in London 'cafe society', yet he was also a controversial public figure and broadcaster, vehemently left-wing in the 1930s, and later President of the British Humanist Association and the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Colourful, intimate, zestful and often poignant, this is a powerful biography of a provocative, cosmopolitan thinker and an intriguing, multi-faceted character.

About this title

Review:

If AJ Ayer, Britain's leading exponent of logical positivism in the 20th century, believed that the good life was none of philosophy's business, then this biography shows he thought it was certainly his business. As a young man in the 1930s discussing the nature of philosophy, Ayer told Isaiah Berlin that it was just about conceptual analysis and the rest, "all of life", was outside its remit. His Language, Truth and Logic was published at this time and Ayer duly spent the rest of his life trying to seal the fate of metaphysics, while living "all of life" to the full--you quickly lose count of his love affairs. He was a man who loved football, clubs, dancing and good food. The combination of his stern analytical philosophy and his aestheticism, and that aestheticism's contradictions (its mix of 1920s dandyism and 1930s rebelliousness), make Ayer's life intriguing.

Ben Rogers' biography is full of anecdotes--when asked by a student about Albert Camus he replied "we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war"; and 40 years on he encountered Mike Tyson apparently assaulting Naomi Campbell and demanded that he and Tyson talk like rational men and settle the situation. You can read such stories not as an unfolding narrative culminating in the definitive Ayer, but like David Hume and Walter Pater, Ayer's philosophic and hedonistic heroes, treat them as a mere "bundle of perceptions" of a man, discrete experiences in the life of Ayer. Of course if you do, you are less likely to condemn him for the vices that seemed to necessarily accompany his joie de vivre--his selfishness and arrogance--and rather think of him simply as a man living for the day. Yet he hankered after a place in history alongside the great philosophers, and here there is a body of work to assess and an overall judgement to be made. Rogers' biography largely puts such assessment to one side, but then that analysis is for philosophy, and biography is about life, it might be said. The beauty of this particular biography, the irony of it being Ayer's, is that you are forced to question that dichotomy--philosophy and life--on every page, as Ayer seeks to solve another philosophic problem, and then heads to the club or restaurant, to a liaison with another girlfriend, for seven decades of logic and pleasure. --Jeff Petts

Review:

"A feat of biography that deserves to take its place alongside the two other great biographies of philosophers of recent times: Michael Ignatieff's "Isaiah Berlin" and Ray Monk's "Wittgenstein"." - "Mail on Sunday""Rogers--provides excellent and sympathetic summaries of all Ayer's main books and articles. Admirable." - "Sunday Times"

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099536811
• ISBN 13: 9780099536819
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416