The Problem of Knowledge of A.J. Ayer

At the end of the war, Ayer at last secured an Oxford fellowship. One year later, in 1946, he was appointed Grote Professor of Mental Philosophy at University College, London. Although little philosophy had been published in England during the war, Ayer found that the philosophical climate was now very different. Influenced by the ideas of the later Wittgenstein, which were only then becoming known outside Cambridge, a group of philosophers at Oxford, led by Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin (1911–60), were arguing persuasively that most philosophical problems were simply conceptual confusions resulting from philosophers’ insufficient attention to the complex ways in which philosophically loaded terms and their cognates were used in ordinary speech (see ordinary language analysis). Although Ayer well understood the Oxford philosophers’ weariness with metaphysical speculation and supported their commitment to careful conceptual analysis, he did not share their hostility toward philosophical theorizing. He remained loyal to the outlook of Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists and admired American philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine (1912–2000), who, like Ayer, attempted to build on the positivists’ work.

The next decade and a half, until the early 1960s, was perhaps the most fruitful of Ayer’s life. He transformed the University College philosophy department into one of the best in the country, rivaling those of Cambridge and even Oxford. He edited several series of books, presided over various discussion groups, developed a friendship with his hero Russell, lectured around the world, and made lively contributions to literary journals and radio broadcasts. At the same time, he produced a series of influential papers—including “Statements About the Past,” “Phenomenalism,” “On What There Is,” “On the Analysis of Moral Judgements,” and “Can There Be a Private Language?”—and what was probably his most philosophically successful book, The Problem of Knowledge (1956).

In this work the great combative proclamations of Language, Truth, and Logic were replaced by a quieter treatment of skepticism, in which Ayer presented the various theories of knowledge that have been propounded by philosophers as responses to a radical skeptic who argues for the existence of gaps between, on the one hand, the belief in an external world, in the existence of other minds, and in the reality of the past and, on the other, the evidence on which these beliefs are based. But whereas Ayer previously had in effect pursued a “reductionism” of all meaningful propositions to the sense-data by which they are verified, he now admitted that not everything can be translated into the language of the senses; instead, the constructions made on the basis of experience have their own inherent validity.

Later years

Ayer was metropolitan in his tastes, enjoying the company of writers, actors, and politicians as much as that of philosophers. He was especially close to Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party until his early death in 1963, and later to the reforming Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins. It was with some misgivings, then, that in 1959 Ayer returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic. As it was, his tenure there, until his retirement in 1978, proved extremely happy. Still fond of provoking and shocking others, Ayer moved to abolish the saying of grace before college dinner and publicly ridiculed the latest philosophical theories emanating from France. But he was a popular colleague and teacher and remained philosophically productive. In 1973 he published The Central Questions of Philosophy, in which he returned to familiar topics in the theory of knowledge and presented a commonsense conception of the world as a theory founded on the basis of sense-data.

The last decade of Ayer’s life was troubled. In 1980 his first wife, Renee Lees, whom he had divorced in 1945, died, and one year later their daughter Valerie died suddenly of Hodgkin disease. In 1982 he divorced his second wife, the writer Dee Wells. His third wife, Vanessa Lawson (formerly married to Nigel Lawson, the chancellor of the Exchequer), died in 1984, leaving him bereft. Suffering from emphysema, he collapsed in 1988 and underwent a remarkable near-death experience, in which, as he later described, he seemed to encounter the “Master of the Universe” and his ministers for space and time. (His account was misunderstood by some critics as a recantation of his atheism.) Just before his real death in 1989, Ayer remarried Dee Wells and was united with his daughter born to the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. It was an end in keeping with his colourful, eventful private life.

Ayer once described himself as “Horatio to Russell’s Hamlet.” But, while Russell was the superior logician, Ayer was arguably the more penetrating and imaginative epistemologist. Asked to assess his contribution at the end of his life, Ayer responded, “I suppose that I care more about having got something right in philosophy, if I have got anything right, than having written elegantly. Although I like that too.”