A.J. Ayer

A.J. Ayer (1910–1989) was a British philosopher whose first book, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), made him the most prominent representative of logical positivism in the English-speaking world. Written at twenty-four, it argued with ferocious clarity that meaningful statements must be verifiable by experience or tautology.

A professor at Oxford, Ayer was also a public intellectual who debated religion, ethics and language on radio and television. Though philosophy moved beyond his early doctrines, his iconoclastic elegance shaped generations of analytic philosophers in Britain.