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Ayer and World Views

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Frederick Copleston
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Extract

As we all know, in Freddie Ayer's famous book Language, Truth and Logic metaphysics received short shrift. Metaphysical assertions were dismissed as being all nonsensical (LTL, 2nd edn, 41). In the work in question Ayer clearly tended to equate metaphysics with what Professor W. H. Walsh was to describe as ‘transcendent’ (as distinct from ‘immanent’) metaphysics (Walsh, 1963). This tendency is also discernible, I think, in the 1949 debate between Ayer and myself on logical positivism. After all, my defence of metaphysics was largely prompted and certainly strengthened by what I believed to be the religious relevance of metaphysical philosophy. A lot of what Aristotle would have described as ‘first philosophy’ and what some later philosophers would have classified as ‘ontology’ Ayer would have called ‘philosophical analysis’. What he was primarily concerned with undermining was any claim by metaphysicians to be able to extend our knowledge of what exists, of the Absolute or God for example, by metaphysical arguments.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 30 , September 1991 , pp. 63 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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References

1 I have in mind Strawson, 's Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959).Google Scholar

2 Unless, of course, one decides to classify as metaphysics some at any rate of what Ayer described as philosophical analysis.

3 In regard to space and time Bradley argued that each is reducible to relations and at the same time that neither can be reduced to relations. Examination of Bradley's arguments, even if they are not accepted, might serve to throw light on the nature of space and time.

4 In other words, metaphysicians are unable to show that their theories are true, even if they happen to be true.

5 See, for example, my Religion and the One: Philosophies East and West (1982). ch. 9.Google Scholar

6 This collection of essays, edited and introduced by Professor Ted Honderich, was published after Ayer's death.