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HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
The Historical and

Philosophical Significance
of Ayer’s Language,
Truth and Logic
Edited by
Adam Tamas Tuboly
History of Analytic Philosophy
Series Editor
Michael Beaney
University Aberdeen, Scotland
Humboldt University Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Series Editor: University of Aberdeen, Scotland, Humboldt University
Berlin, Berlin,Germany.
Editorial Board
Claudio de Almeida, Pontifical Catholic University at Porto Alegre, Brazil
Maria Baghramian, University College Dublin, Ireland
Thomas Baldwin, University of York, England
Stewart Candlish, University of Western Australia
Chen Bo, Peking University, China
Jonathan Dancy, University of Reading, England
José Ferreirós, University of Seville, Spain
Michael Friedman, Stanford University, USA
Gottfried Gabriel, University of Jena, Germany
Juliet Floyd, Boston University, USA
Hanjo Glock, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Nicholas Griffin, McMaster University, Canada
Leila Haaparanta, University of Tampere, Finland
Peter Hylton, University of Illinois, USA
Jiang Yi, Beijing Normal University, China
Javier Legris, National Academy of Sciences of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto, Canada
Nenad Miscevic, University of Maribor, Slovenia, and Central European
University, Budapest
Volker Peckhaus, University of Paderborn, Germany
Eva Picardi, University of Bologna, Italy
Erich Reck, University of California at Riverside, USA
Peter Simons, Trinity College, Dublin
Thomas Uebel, University of Manchester, England.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14867
Adam Tamas Tuboly
Editor
The Historical
and Philosophical
Significance of Ayer’s
Language, Truth
and Logic
Editor
Adam Tamas Tuboly
Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Budapest, Hungary
Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School
University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary
ISSN 2634-5994 ISSN 2634-6001 (electronic)

History of Analytic Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-030-50883-8 ISBN 978-3-030-50884-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Gabó, Sára, and Róza Lilla
Series Editor’s Foreword
During the first half of the twentieth century analytic philosophy gradu-
ally established itself as the dominant tradition in the English-speaking
world, and over the last few decades it has taken firm root in many other
parts of the world. There has been increasing debate over just what ‘ana-
lytic philosophy’ means, as the movement has ramified into the complex
tradition that we know today, but the influence of the concerns, ideas and
methods of early analytic philosophy on contemporary thought is indis-
putable. All this has led to greater self-consciousness among analytic phi-
losophers about the nature and origins of their tradition, and scholarly
interest in its historical development and philosophical foundations has
blossomed in recent years, with the result that history of analytic philoso-
phy is now recognized as a major field of philosophy in its own right.
The main aim of the series in which this book appears, the first series
of its kind, is to create a venue for work on the history of analytic philoso-
phy, consolidating the area as a major field of philosophy and promoting
further research and debate. The ‘history of analytic philosophy’ is under-
stood broadly, as covering the period from the last three decades of the
nineteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century, beginning
with the work of Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, who are gener-
ally regarded as its main founders, and the influences upon them, and
going right up to the most recent developments. In allowing the ‘history’
vii
viii Series Editor’s Foreword
to extend to the present, the aim is to encourage engagement with con-

temporary debates in philosophy, for example, in showing how the con-
cerns of early analytic philosophy relate to current concerns. In focusing
on analytic philosophy, the aim is not to exclude comparisons with
other—earlier or contemporary—traditions, or consideration of figures
or themes that some might regard as marginal to the analytic tradition
but which also throw light on analytic philosophy. Indeed, a further aim
of the series is to deepen our understanding of the broader context in
which analytic philosophy developed, by looking, for example, at the
roots of analytic philosophy in neo-Kantianism or British idealism, or the
connections between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, or dis-
cussing the work of philosophers who were important in the develop-
ment of analytic philosophy but who are now often forgotten.
This volume, edited by Adam Tamas Tuboly, illustrates very well the
range of work that is now being done in history of analytic philosophy,
even when the focus is on one particular philosopher, and indeed, on just
one text. A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) is one of the key figures in the second
generation of analytic philosophers and is often credited with introduc-
ing logical positivism into British philosophy, thereby shaking up some
of the established traditions in Britain, especially at Oxford. The canoni-
cal text, in this regard, is his Language, Truth and Logic, first published in
1936, with a second, revised edition appearing in 1946.
As the contributions to this volume show, most of the ideas and doc-
trines of the book have not stood the test of time. Indeed, even Ayer
himself later admitted that almost all the details were incorrect, the only
thing that he continued to endorse being the ‘spirit’ in which it was writ-
ten. The errors are themselves instructive, however; recognizing them can
lead to refinements of the ideas or doctrines or their replacement by bet-
ter ones, and a deeper understanding, generally, of the philosophical
problems addressed. Claims he made about analyticity, linguistic analy-
sis, the problem of other minds and verificationism, for example, are
critically examined and insightfully elucidated in Parts II, III and IV of
this volume.
If we are to understand the historical significance of Ayer’s book,
though, then we have to do more than critically engage with particular
ideas and doctrines, however central they may be to either Ayer’s book
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
itself or the philosophical traditions in which debate about them played

an important role. The first three chapters and the final chapter offer
discussion of the wider historical context in which the significance of
Language, Truth and Logic can be appreciated. The first three chapters
shed light on the genesis and immediate reception of the book, helping
to explain its influence despite the simplifications and errors that are
plainly present. The last chapter places the book in the much wider con-
text of social and political developments over the last 100 years, develop-
ments that have led to the world crisis that we are now in as I write, with
the rise of right-wing populism and threats to democracy itself, the cul-
ture of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’, and the coronavirus disease of
2019 (COVID-19) health crisis that has revealed all sorts of social and
political failings and fractures in the attempts that countries across the
world have made to respond to it. Adopting the term from Dallas Willard,
Aaron Preston argues that it is ‘the disappearance of moral knowledge’
that has played a major role in our current world crisis, and he identifies
the crude positivism of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic as contributing
to that disappearance. Whether or not one agrees with all the details of
Preston’s own account, it demonstrates the importance of revisiting the
canonical texts of analytic philosophy, even if they are now seen to con-
tain errors or to have been part of a superseded or discredited tradition.
As a field of philosophy, then, history of analytic philosophy covers
everything from the most focused critical examination of particular argu-
ments in the writings of analytic philosophers to the widest-angled view
of the relevant historical context, and from attempts to understand what
exactly a philosopher meant or was doing in a given passage to reassess-
ments of their work and its significance in the light of our current con-
cerns and perspectives. This volume offers fine examples of the full range
of these approaches, demonstrating the maturity that the relatively new
field of history of philosophy has now reached and the contribution that
it now makes to wider social and political debates.
Berlin, Germany Michael Beaney

June 2020
Contents
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer

and His Language, Truth and Logic 1
Adam Tamas Tuboly
Part I The Book and Its Context 39
2 Language, Truth and Logic and the Anglophone

Reception of the Vienna Circle 41
Andreas Vrahimis
3 ‘Viennese Bombshells’: Reactions to Language, Truth

and Logic from Ayer’s Philosophical Contemporaries 69
Siobhan Chapman
Part II Philosophy of Language in LTL 99
4 Ayer on Analyticity101
Nicole Rathgeb
xi
xii Contents
5 Linguistic Analysis: Ayer and Early Ordinary

Language Philosophy123
Sally Parker-Ryan
Part III Philosophy of Mind and Psychology 151
6 The Evolution of Ayer’s Views on the Mind-Body Relation153

Gergely Ambrus
7 A Logical Positivist’s Progress: A Puzzle About Other

Minds in Early Ayer Resolved191
Thomas Uebel
Part IV Epistemology and Truth 249
8 Ayer’s Verificationism: Dead as a Dodo?251

Hans-Johann Glock
9 Definition Versus Criterion: Ayer on the Problem

of Truth and Validation279
László Kocsis
Part V Ethics and Values 305
10 Ayer and Berkeley on the Meaning of Ethical and

Religious Language307
Krisztián Pete
11 Ayer’s Book of Errors and the Crises of Contemporary

Western Culture333
Aaron Preston
Index365
Notes on Contributors
Gergely Ambrus is an assistant professor at the Eötvös Loránd

University, Budapest. He works primarily on the philosophy of mind,
philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Among
his interests are metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Several of his
articles on the Vienna Circle and the philosophy of mind, especially on
Herbert Feigl and Béla Juhos, have appeared in journals and books.
Siobhan Chapman is a professor at the Department of English,
University of Liverpool. She mainly works on pragmatics, philosophy of
language, history of analytic philosophy and pragmatic stylistics. She has
published numerous articles and books on the questions of language,
among others Language and Empiricism: After the Vienna Circle (2006,
Palgrave), Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist (2005, Palgrave), and
Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense (2013, Palgrave).
Hans-Johann Glock is a professor and head of the philosophy depart-
ment at the University of Zurich. He works on the philosophy of lan-
guage and animals, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the history of analytic
philosophy. He is editor of A Companion to Wittgenstein (2017) and
Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P. M. S. Hacker (2009),
and author of What Is Analytic Philosophy? (2008).
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
László Kocsis is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy,

University of Pécs. He is mainly interested in metaphysics, theories of
truth and truth making, but works also on the history of analytic philoso-
phy. His monograph and anthology on truth has appeared in Hungarian
in 2017 and 2018.
Sally Parker-Ryan is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of
Philosophy, SMU, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. She
works mainly in the metaphilosophical area of methodology, with a focus
on defending Ordinary Language Philosophy as an overlooked and
underestimated approach to understanding what we are doing, when we
do philosophy. Her papers on the role, methodology, and history of
Ordinary Language Philosophy have appeared in many publications.
Krisztián Pete is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy,
University of Pécs. He is mainly interested in the philosophy of language
(Grice and pragmatic theories), informal logic, and early modern phi-
losophy (Hume, Berkeley). He defended his PhD thesis on the critical
appreciation of Grice’s philosophy of language and works now on various
articles about Berkeley’s philosophy.
Aaron Preston is an associate professor at Valparaiso University. His
research interests include ancient philosophy, moral philosophy, philoso-
phy of religion and the history of analytic philosophy. He published a
monograph about analytic philosophy (Analytic Philosophy: History of an
Illusion, 2010), and edited Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive
History (2017).
Nicole Rathgeb is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of
Hertfordshire. She works on philosophical methodology, the philosophy
of language and the philosophy of mind. She has published an article on
the purpose of conceptual analysis, and a monograph on Ordinary
Language Philosophy is forthcoming.
Adam Tamas Tuboly is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of
Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and research fellow at the
Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of
Pécs. He works on the history of logical empiricism and the philosophy
Notes on Contributors xv
of the modalities. He edited numerous volumes at Bloomsbury,

Routledge, Springer, and SUNY Press.
Thomas Uebel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester,
England. He is the author of Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within
(1992), Vernunftkritik und Wissenschaft (Springer, 2000), Empiricism at
the Crossroads (2007), and co-author of Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between
Science and Politics (1996), editor of Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna
Circle (1991), and coeditor of Otto Neurath: Economic Writings. Selections
1904–1945 (2004).
Andreas Vrahimis works at the Department of Classical Studies and
Philosophy, University of Cyprus. His research focuses on the analytic-
continental divide from various perspectives. Besides numerous articles,
he has authored Encounters Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
(Palgrave, 2013).
1
Introduction: From Spying
to Canonizing—Ayer and His Language,
Truth and Logic
Adam Tamas Tuboly
1.1 Introduction
The American pragmatist-naturalist-logical empiricist philosopher Ernest
Nagel spent a year in Europe, after which he wrote, in a remarkable two-
part essay, that “it was reported to me that in England some of the older
men were dumbfounded and scandalized when, at a public meeting, a
brilliant young adherent of the Wiener Kreis threatened them with early
extinction since ‘the armies of Cambridge and Vienna were already upon
them’” (Nagel 1936a, 9).1 Putting together other pieces of the puzzle,
1
This work was supported by the MTA Lendület Morals and Science Research Group, by the MTA
Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship, and finally, by the “Empiricism and atomism in the twentieth-
century Anglo-Saxon philosophy” NKFIH project (124970). I am grateful to Thomas Uebel,
Andreas Vrahimis and an anonymous referee for the helpful comments on the previous version.
A. T. Tuboly (*)
Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of Pécs,
Pécs, Hungary
© The Author(s) 2021 1

A. T. Tuboly (ed.), The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language,
Truth and Logic, History of Analytic Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5_1
2 A. T. Tuboly
Ben Rogers (1999, 104) identified Nagel’s reported warlord as Alfred

Jules Ayer (1910–1989), known to many in the Oxford and London
social circles as “Freddie Ayer.”
Though it had its antecedents in periodicals and conferences, when it
came out in January 1936, Ayer’s short, dense, and vigorous book,
Language, Truth and Logic (“LTL”) nevertheless shocked the British phil-
osophical community. Published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. (at that time
known by many for its leftist books), LTL was written by a young,
25-year-old philosopher, a fact that was reflected in many different ways
in the book’s pages. It was filled with fresh ideas and precise argumenta-
tions; all of them put forward aggressively and sometimes without suffi-
ciently taking the wider context and the boring details of the views of
others into account. His enthusiasm helped Ayer in overcoming some of
the dusty academic conventions about being modest, moderate, and
respectful even toward those who hold contrary opinions—or as Ayer
liked to call them, “enemies.” Nonetheless, it is hard to underestimate
LTL’s pivotal role in early and mid-century British philosophical debates
and in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy more
generally.2
Ayer’s work was praised and damned equally, and readers often
described the book and its author in extreme terms: “a combination of
immaturity, loose thinking and wholly unwarranted cocksureness; […]
mental anarchy” (Tomlin 1936, 217); “hypnotic clarity” (Warnock,
G.J. 1958, 43); “a bombshell” (Warnock, M. 1960, 79); the “enfant
terrible of Oxford philosophy” (Grice 1986, 48); “a bestseller […], a daz-
zling and revolutionary work” (Medawar 1988, 53); “the last Bible of
British Nonconformity” (Wollheim 1991, 23); and “the most wicked
man in Oxford” (quoted in Rogers 1999, 125). Nonetheless, perhaps the
most appealing compliment from within the British scene came from
Bertrand Russell (1947, 71) who wrote, in his review of the second
All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946 see Ayer
(1936/1946), abbreviated in the text as “LTL.”
2
Ayer is among those figures of the analytic tradition who were the subject of numerous volumes
and Festschrifts. See MacDonald (1979), MacDonald and Wright (1986b), Gower (1987),
Griffiths (1991), and Hahn (1992).
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His… 3
edition, that “I can give the sincerest praise possible, namely that I should
like to have written it myself when young.”
As a long-time professor, first in London and then at Oxford, Ayer
almost singlehandedly sowed the seeds of logical positivism in England—
at least that’s how the story goes. LTL was popularly regarded as a suc-
cinct and elegant summary of the Vienna Circle’s philosophy. Recent
historians of logical empiricism, however, have worried that its elegance
and brevity were achieved at the cost of oversimplifying and distorting
the actual positions endorsed by members of the Vienna Circle, resulting
in a misleading portrait of logical empiricism.
With these diverse conceptions in mind, it is still not at all clear how
LTL is to be regarded, and how its philosophical and historical signifi-
cance is to be evaluated, both in its own right, and with regard to the
dissemination of logical empiricism in Britain. This volume thus aims to
reconsider the significance of Ayer’s LTL, both in historical and philo-
sophical terms. Among the questions that need to be asked and discussed
are the following: how did Ayer preserve or distort the views and concep-
tions of the logical empiricists, especially those of Otto Neurath and
Rudolf Carnap? How are Ayer’s arguments different from those he aimed
to reconstruct? How influential was LTL really, and what are the factors
that explain its success in Britain and especially at Oxford? Besides the
general chapters on the background and context of LTL, most chapters of
this volume discuss particular aspects and themes of the book, such as
verification, ethics, values, truth, other minds, and sense data.
1.2 The Way to Language, Truth and Logic

1.2.1 A Few Months in Vienna
After his 1932 graduation from Oxford, Ayer decided to leave behind the
“metaphysical” atmosphere of his alma mater and hoped to continue his
studies at Cambridge, where the new philosophies of Moore, Russell, and
4 A. T. Tuboly
especially Wittgenstein were then prevalent.3 Nonetheless, Ayer’s Christ

Church tutor, Gilbert Ryle, did not support this idea. Since Wittgenstein
was not officially discussed at Oxford, Ryle’s suggestion was a European
tour. Ryle had met Moritz Schlick at the International Congress for
Philosophy in Oxford two years before, and the Viennese-based philoso-
pher made such an impact on him that he told Ayer to head directly to
Vienna, where he was supposed to enroll at the university to attend
Schlick’s lectures and participate in the meetings of the so-called Vienna
Circle. In Ayer’s (1978, 121) recollection, Ryle argued that “by coming
back with a report of their activities I should be not only benefiting
myself but performing a public service.” Ayer thus became a British phil-
osophical spy in Red Vienna.
The Vienna Circle was an interdisciplinary discussion group, which
existed roughly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, though
outside of its official institutional structure. Every Thursday evening in
term time (at least that is the appealing myth—in fact, meetings were
often delayed and became quite irregular after 1932), philosophically
inclined scientists and scientifically trained philosophers gathered at the
library of the Mathematical Institute in order to discuss the relation
between science, philosophy, and society. While these topics also occu-
pied most nineteenth and early twentieth-century philosophers (it is
enough to mention Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, Hermann von
Helmholtz, and most of the neo-Kantians, such as Hermann Cohen and
Ernst Cassirer), much of the Vienna Circle’s originality came from its
ability to integrate different philosophical approaches. In order to follow
and interpret the latest developments in theoretical physics, members of
the Circle therefore tried to combine the empiricism of Ernst Mach,
Richard Avenarius, and Bertrand Russell with the conventionalism of
3
In 1935, after he had won a new scholarship, Ayer still complained to Otto Neurath that “at
Oxford, where I work, metaphysics still predominates. I feel very isolated there, and have even been
made to suffer economically for my views.” A.J. Ayer to Otto Neurath, December 31, 1935
(ONN). As we shall see below in Sect. 1.2.2, according to some scholars, metaphysics was not at
all the dominant approach and field of study in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it may be true that Oxford
was a rather conservative place marked by adherence to old ways of thinking, often based on the
readings of the Greats. As Ryle (1971, 5) recalled, after H.H. Price had demonstrated the value of
what was happening at Cambridge (Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein), “Oxford’s hermetically
conserved atmosphere began to smell stuffy even to ourselves.”
Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré, as well as with the new logico-
mathematical devices of Russell and Wittgenstein.
Besides theoretical physics, the members of the Circle displayed a great
diversity of scientific training and interest. Felix Kaufmann was a legal
expert; Otto Neurath, an economist and sociologist; Edgar Zilsel, a his-
torian; Karl Menger and Hans Hahn, mathematicians; Friedrich
Waismann also trained as a mathematician, but quickly turned to pure
philosophy; and finally, Viktor Kraft had a background in geography.
That being said, besides a broad interest in psychology, ethics, culture,
biology, and linguistics, physics was the main field of study and inspira-
tion for Herbert Feigl, Béla Juhos, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, and
Moritz Schlick, who, as the only local university professor among the
group, acted as its leader (for a while, they were known as “the Schlick
Circle”). Given their method of combining the scientifically sober
approach of empiricism with the strict method of logic, their approach
was often called “logical empiricism.” While this moniker was not whole-
heartedly embraced by all members of the group—thus it revealed deep
philosophical differences—I will keep referring to “logical empiricism”
for reasons of simplicity.4
By 1932/1933, the Circle was somewhat past its heyday. It had entered
the public scene in 1929 with the publication of its manifesto (Carnap,
Hahn, Neurath 1929/1973), which caused division among some of its
members because of its philosophical stance and socio-political layers.
Carnap had already published Der logische Aufbau der Welt in 1928 and
then left for Prague during the fall of 1931. The debate on the structure
of sentences describing basic experiential issues (the so-called protocol-
sentence debate) went on for years, though most of the Circle’s members
were out of town from time to time. This fluctuation in activity is not
simply an outsider’s evaluation; it was also noted by members of the
Circle themselves. Gustav Bergmann (1993, 195), a peripheral member,
4
A similar discussion group evolved in the mid-1920s in Berlin. Hans Reichenbach, who is often
considered its leader, claimed that what distinguished the Berlin Group from the Viennese one was
that it kept close watch of the sciences, in contrast to the latter’s philosophical inclination towards
general ideas. As a result, Reichenbach tended to refer to the unfolding movement in Berlin as
“logical empiricism” and to the Viennese one as “logical positivism.” For the philosophical and
general significance of these terms, see Uebel (2013).
6 A. T. Tuboly
later wrote that the Circle “already reached its highpoint in 1927/28,
maintained momentum for several years and by 1931/32 already showed
clear signs of splintering and, as a consequence, declining” as the original
scientific outlook of the group was replaced by Schlick’s Wittgenstein-
inspired vision. In a letter, Schlick himself (known for his admiration of
Wittgenstein) stated that he would not hold any meetings of the Circle
during the winter of 1933 as “[s]ome of our old members have grown too
dogmatic and might discredit the whole movement; so I am now trying
to form a new circle out of younger men who are still free from princi-
ples” (Moritz Schlick to David Rynin, November 4, 1933). The times
were changing, and everyone felt that the philosophical (and often per-
sonal) struggles and debates had undermined the group’s internal unity
(or at least the appearance thereof ).
When he arrived in December of 1932, Ayer thus experienced a rather
peculiar Vienna Circle: a rapidly changing, factious group that had
already diminished in numbers. While he was perhaps unaware of these
tensions, his stay in Vienna inevitably determined what made it into his
book (or perhaps more importantly, what did not). Ayer attended
Schlick’s philosophy of nature course at the university and the private
meetings of the Circle at the library of the Mathematical Institute.
Between January and March 1933 (when Ayer returned to Oxford), it
was mainly Schlick, Waismann, Hahn, Menger, and Kurt Gödel, occa-
sionally Neurath and presumably Kaufmann and W.V.O. Quine who
were present at the discussions.
During these few months, Ayer witnessed the debate surrounding the
nature of protocol-sentences at its peak. Neurath defended a fallibilist-
physicalist conception and argued that the so-called protocol sentences
were about physical (space-time located) objects and that all such sen-
tences were always revisable, while Schlick advocated for a more subjec-
tivist and foundationalist conception. Ayer’s (1978, 134) sympathies
“la[y] mainly with Schlick” though in time he “[came] to agree with
Neurath that all our beliefs are fallible.”5 At the university of Vienna,
5
The precise nature and scope of the protocol-sentence debate (especially Schlick’s conception) is
still under discussion, but for an up-to-date presentation, see Uebel (2007). As Thomas Uebel
argues in his chapter in this volume, after the publication of LTL, Ayer again sided with Schlick and
Schlick lectured mainly about the laws of nature, conventions, space-

time, and probability—topics that Ayer had presumably encountered
through his English contemporaries (like Richard Braithwaite and
C.D. Broad), and thus neither produced any revelation nor influenced
him in the long run.
At the Thursday meetings (which at that time were held every second
week), Ayer tried to follow the discussions, with more or less success. In
his letters and later memoirs, he emphasized that his command of the
German language was quite rudimentary, and though it admittedly
improved with time, it was hard for him to follow the informal discus-
sions or to raise relevant questions (1978, 134). As he wrote to Ryle in the
report about his mission, “[o]n the whole I have got very little out of
them all” (Ayer to Ryle, February 19, 1933; quoted in Harré and Shosky
1999, 31). Nonetheless, Ayer got a sense of the general atmosphere as
well as a glimpse of the democratic discussion ideal of the Circle, and
embraced most of its core theses, especially as these were conveyed to him
in a rather polemic manner. I do not mean to imply that Ayer’s linguistic
difficulties are the main source of his misrepresentations and oversimpli-
fications, but they certainly hindered his understanding of all the exhaus-
tive distinctions, the nuanced divergences, and the continental
background of the Circle.
1.2.2 The Genesis of LTL
After his culturally engaged stay of four months in Vienna, Ayer travelled
back to Oxford to take up his scholarship at Christ Church. With his
usual passion and extraordinary speed, he quickly began to write articles
and gave lectures on “The Philosophy of Analysis (Russell, Wittgenstein,
Carnap)”; as Ayer’s biographer, Ben Rogers (1999, 99) has claimed, this
“seems to have been the first time anyone in Oxford had ever given a
lecture series on a living philosopher.”
Besides lecturing on the novel scientific philosophy, Ayer started to
publish many of his new ideas and insights. That same year, his very first
developed a foundationalist conception, based on the correspondence theory of truth (see also
László Kocsis’ chapter below).
8 A. T. Tuboly
philosophical paper appeared in The New Oxford Outlook (a magazine for

Oxford scholars) and discussed behaviorism (Ayer 1933a). In this quite
radical and popularizing paper, Ayer identified the task of philosophy as
a search for meanings, in this case, the translation of mental terms into
behavioristically accepted ones. During the years 1933 and 1934, Ayer
published ten articles, some of them contradicting each other on funda-
mental issues (e.g. whether or not there are atomic propositions that
describe basic facts), but all of which pointed toward a bigger project, a
general worldview. As Richard Wollheim (1991, 23) noted, “[LTL] cer-
tainly articulated a vision of the world,” and Ayer’s separate, mostly short
papers indeed raised the possibility of a more general conception. To
begin with, Ayer (1933b) wrote a piece about “Atomic Propositions,” in
which he argued that even the propositions describing an individual’s
own sense-experience could be factually mistaken, and that far from
being secure, all our basic propositions are revisable. As Ayer (1933b, 4)
wrote in the spirit of Neurath, “[o]ne’s own assertions are logically no
more sacrosanct than other people’s.”
While in LTL, Ayer still claimed that all our empirical propositions
are, in fact, hypotheses, and can thus be abandoned (LTL, 38), he
formulated this point more clearly in his response to Béla Juhos regarding
the negation of empirical propositions:
It is true of every empirical hypothesis that we can continue to accept it, in

the face of apparently unfavourable evidence, if we are prepared to make
suitable assumptions. Whether it is rational to make these assumptions is,
of course, another question which does not concern us here. (Ayer
1936c, 262)
Thus, around the time he published LTL, Ayer thought that empirical
statements are anything but certain and “sacrosanct”; they could be
revised at any time and upheld against any supposed counterexamples. In
fact, Ayer (LTL, 38, n.7) later argued that falsification faces similar trou-
bles to verification (neither of them could be conclusive), a point he
explicitly directed against Karl Popper; he later recalled that he was moti-
vated in this reasoning by Poincaré, from whom he took a certain form of
holism (Ayer 1987, 28).
While “Atomic Propositions” did not explicitly refer to the Vienna

Circle (besides a quick mention in the final short note of the paper), Ayer
published two papers about metaphysics in 1934 that addressed issues
and solutions of logical empiricism directly.6 In the first paper,
“Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics,” Ayer (1934a, 335)
stated that his views were “not original” and that he only aimed to express
the logical empiricists’ concerns in a clearer fashion. He took Carnap’s
view that the metaphysician’s sentences are not uncertain, arbitrary, or
simply false, but that they are nonsensical. He argued that metaphysics
arises from two sources, namely from linguistic or grammatical mistakes
and from emotional extrapolations. About the latter, he wrote that
metaphysicians “wish to present them not as feelings of their own, but
somehow objectively as facts; therefore they express them in the form of
argument and theory. But noting is thereby asserted” (Ayer 1934a, 342).
With these vehement attacks, Ayer had already stepped on some
people’s toes. Even before his first anti-metaphysics paper, the British
philosopher and psychologist C.A. Mace (1934a) had criticized Ayer’s
approach as being too simplified in allowing only fact-representations (of
science) and emotion-expressions (of arts). Mace upheld the thesis that
all sentences have both representative and expressive functions; just as a
poet’s verses have both literal and emotive meaning, he suggested that
even the metaphysician’s sentences might mean something. Ayer (1934b)
quickly responded to Mace and tried to underline the differences between
poets who, in their special way, write intentionally, and metaphysicians
who are caught up in linguistic traps and thereby produce “rubbish”
(Ayer 1934b, 56). Although Mace (1934b) replied to Ayer, their debate
did not cross the threshold of responsiveness of the philosophical
community at large. Perhaps this was due, as some have claimed, to the
idea that metaphysics was already dead in England by the time of
Ayer’s rise:
6
Ayer’s third paper, “On Particulars and Universals,” did not consider the Vienna Circle explicitly,
except for a quick note at the end of the paper, which is concerned with structure and not with
content (Ayer 1933c, 62). In fact, the paper mentions only Frank Ramsey and Russell. Thus,
seemingly, Ayer at first tried to adapt himself to the regular British scene, given that his “Atomic
Propositions” focused on atomic facts, the main question of the so-called Cambridge School, which
Susan Stebbing had discussed in some detail.
10 A. T. Tuboly
The sort of supra-mundane, transcendent metaphysics which was the

particular object of Positivistic odium was, in this country, already almost
wholly extinct when their attack was launched. There was a coffin, perhaps,
to be nailed up, but no Goliath to be conquered. (Warnock 1958, 122)
Note the tension here: Ayer always complained that Oxford was a place
full of metaphysics, while G.J. Warnock (and others) argued that logical
positivism à la Ayer simply came too late, since metaphysics was already
in decline by the 1930s. Even if the critics are right, what Ayer felt to be
the general atmosphere is a different issue. On the other hand, Warnock
presumably had in mind British idealism as the most characteristic form
of English metaphysics, which was indeed declining in the 1930s. Gilbert
Ryle (1971, 10) once formulated a similar diagnosis: “Most of us took
fairly untragically [the Vienna Circle’s] demolition of Metaphysics. After
all, we never met anyone engaged in committing any metaphysics; our
copies of Appearance and Reality were dusty; and most of us had never
seen a copy of Sein und Zeit.” (Except for Ryle, of course, who reviewed
Martin Heidegger’s book in 1929.) But this assessment (regarding the
demise of metaphysics by the 1930s) is true only with two reservations.
First, though idealism was overcome in philosophical circles, influential
scientists like James Jeans and Arthur Eddington had just recognized its
potential value and power in scientific popularizing (Tuboly 2020a).
Secondly, even though Warnock may have been right about the status of
metaphysics in England (notwithstanding Ayer’s constant complaints
about his metaphysics professors at Oxford), the rising tide of phenom-
enology, existentialism, and other schools of thought in Germany and
France was already lapping at England’s shores.
In the two years before the publication of LTL, Ayer published papers
about internal relations (Ayer 1935a), truth and protocol sentences (Ayer
1935b), and the analytic movement in England (Ayer 1936c), the latter,
upon Neurath’s request, for the 1935 Paris congress on the unity of
science.
As always, he was quite productive, and all his philosophical thoughts
revolved around some of the central arguments of LTL. Right after Ayer
returned to Oxford, his views were out in the open and critical voices
were already abundant (see below). In order to keep up Ayer’s enthusiasm
and perhaps to settle some of the disputes and thus straighten things out,
one of his best friends, Isaiah Berlin, suggested that he compile his
thoughts in a small booklet. Ayer followed the advice, sat down in his
small room at Oxford, and after writing the same number of words every
morning, finished LTL in one and a half years, a few months before his
25th birthday.
1.3 The Book of a Young Philosopher

Language, Truth and Logic came out in January 1936; initially, only 500
copies were printed because at that time Gollancz focused on political
titles (especially from the radical left) and underestimated the demand.
The following month, another 250 were issued, and the book went
through four reprints before the war, though this still amounted to fewer
than 2000 copies. To put this in context, Sir Arthur Eddington’s The
Nature of the Physical World sold more than 20,000 copies between 1928
and 1938, while more than 100,000 copies of Sir James Jeans’ The
Mysterious Universe were printed within two years (Whitworth 1996, 67,
71). In Ayer’s case, Gollancz was always careful not to print too much at
once. As the book came to be known and used quickly (Ayer even claimed
that it was circulated as a textbook; LTL, 5), Gollancz decided to issue a
second edition for which Ayer wrote a longer introduction, explaining
the changes in his views between 1936 and 1946 (see LTL, 5–26). The
second edition, with the new introduction, became an internationally
known textbook on logical empiricism. Altogether, LTL went through
more than 27 reprints, and it has never been out of print.
1.3.1 The Content of LTL and Its Main Theses
Ayer repeatedly claimed, perhaps to ward off criticism, or possibly because

he indeed believed it, that the book did not contain any new thoughts,
but only a novel way of presenting and ordering the rich material to
which it referred. Much later, this idea resurfaced in the secondary litera-
ture, and even in Ayer’s last Festschrift, Anthony Quinton (1991, 40)
12 A. T. Tuboly
noted that LTL “is almost wholly composed of preexisting material.”

Whether this is, in fact, true or not is the subject of the various chapters
of this volume, but in the following paragraphs I will provide a starting
point by outlining the book’s main theses.7
The first chapter of LTL, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” which
echoes Carnap’s famous “Überwindung” paper in a somewhat more radi-
cal fashion, sets the tone of the book and contains the basics of Ayer’s
toolkit. Enemies are introduced: metaphysicians who intentionally pro-
duce mystical systems, building them up from significant and objective
propositions, but who are then deceived by the superficial grammar of
language (LTL, 33). What is his problem with these people? Metaphysicians
claim that they have (or aim for) knowledge that transcends empirical
reality; but if the range of significant propositions is limited to that of the
empirical ones (and the tautological ones, see below), then metaphysics
will be meaningless by definition. Ayer’s main task is therefore twofold:
to show that all metaphysicians try to go beyond the empirical realm and
to buttress his core thesis that only empirical propositions are meaningful
in a literal sense.
The first seems to be (a rather plausible) assumption, given that most
of the well-known German, French, and English metaphysicians of the
period indeed tried to reveal the non-empirical essence and nature of the
world. Regarding the second, Ayer utilizes his “criterion of verification.”
For him, only those statements are literally meaningful (this needs to be
emphasized, as Ayer seems to accept a sort of subjective moral and aes-
thetical significance beyond literal meaningfulness) which can be veri-
fied; that is, “a sentence is factually [or literally] significant to any given
person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it
purports to express” (LTL, 35). Verification is thus closely tied to experi-
ence, but Ayer also differentiates between practical verifiability (an actual
act of verification, carried out in a concrete situation) and verification in
principle (an act of verification that cannot be carried out for practical
reasons but can be described in theory). Furthermore, he makes a
7
In 1936, the very first critical review of LTL claimed that “the whole book proves much less than
either the dust-cover or his own first paragraph appear to assume” (Tomlin 1936, 202, original
emphasis).
distinction regarding the strength of verification; a proposition is strongly

verifiable if it can be conclusively established in experience and weakly
verifiable if it is possible for our experience to render it probable (LTL,
37). After some examples and counterexamples, Ayer focuses on “weak
verification in principle” and marks the question about meaningfulness
as follows: “Would any observations be relevant to the determination of
a proposition’s truth or falsehood?” If yes, then it is factually/literally/
empirically meaningful, if not, then it is meaningless.8
Since metaphysical statements describe a realm that lies beyond (or
above) the empirical, they cannot be verified—neither in practice nor in
principle. Therefore, metaphysical statements are literally meaningless.
Needless to say, this amounts to a rather negative narrative or even a cru-
sade, and in fact, LTL lacks Carnap’s positive narrative about the existen-
tial significance of metaphysics (a view which had its roots in Nietzsche’s
and Dilthey’s philosophy and which obviously did not have any influence
on the young Ayer).
Verification is doubtless the cornerstone of Ayer’s philosophy. If we can
indeed separate the meaningful from the meaningless via verification,
then metaphysics would simply be doomed to failure, the task of philoso-
phy could be defined more easily along the lines of science, and we could
also settle questions of morality and religion. Many philosophers recog-
nized verification as being of utmost importance for positivists; already in
1935, W.T. Stace (1935, 418) called the idea “the now famous ‘principle
of verifiability’,” and most of the papers published by British philosophers
before and after LTL that dealt with positivism concerned verification.9
8
Ayer seemingly does not differentiate between verification as a criterion of meaningfulness, and
verification as a certain form of theory which determines the meaning of a proposition. Hans-
Johann Glock’s chapter in this volume takes up verification in detail.
9
Before LTL, Margaret MacDonald (1934) tried to clarify the issue of verification by pointing out
that determining the truth and falsity of a proposition first requires an understanding of the
proposition in question (contrary to Schlick’s famous doctrine that to understand the meaning of
a proposition is to indicate the ways in which the proposition will be verified). In 1934, an entire
symposium was devoted to questions of verification (Stebbing et al. 1934), and verification was also
at stake for Max Black (1934) and for W.T. Stace (1935) who—in their replies to Ayer (1934a)—
were critical of some of the details while supporting the intuitive core of the verification idea. After
the publication of LTL, Gilbert Ryle (1936) wrote a shorter critical article. Stace’s (1935) paper
became quite influential, with Ayer (1936a) producing a reply immediately after the publication of
LTL, which was in turn followed by Alfred Sidgwick’s (1936) response. In 1937, A.C. Ewing
14 A. T. Tuboly
Some of them attacked verification in general and Ayer’s version in

particular, the details of which were in constant flux; what seemed to
matter most for Ayer was only the general idea that experience plays a
crucial role in the characterization, determination, and understanding of
propositions that purport to have factual meaning.10
Having thus set the scene, in the second chapter Ayer defines the task
of philosophy as a certain critical-linguistic analysis of scientific and com-
mon-sense statements. The propositions of philosophy are not first prin-
ciples (LTL, 46–48), and philosophy should not vindicate scientific
statements either (LTL, 48–50), that is, science does not depend on phi-
losophy. “The propositions of philosophy,” according to Ayer (LTL, 57),
“are not factual, but linguistic in character—[…] they express definitions,
or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly, we may say that
philosophy is a department of logic.” But what is the precise nature of
this type of analysis?11
Ayer provides the following example in the their chapter, taken from
Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions, to show what he means when
he says that the function of philosophy is to provide definitions in use.
According to Ayer, “we define a symbol in use, not by saying that it is
(1937) published another paper on verification and meaninglessness, to which Sidgwick (1937)
replied, followed by Ewing’s (1938) counter-reply. Verification was the topic of two more technical
papers by Morris Lazerowitz’s (1937, 1939), Bertrand Russell (1937) devoted his presidential
address at the Aristotelian Society to verification and Ayer’s friend, Isaiah Berlin (1938) also wrote
about the topic. Finally, there were two further substantial events, John Wisdom’s 50-page essay
(1938) and another symposium (Mackinnon et al. 1945) right before the second edition of LTL. As
can be gleaned from this list, verification was a hot topic in England for many years, even after the
Viennese logical empiricists had left it behind, first for confirmation and later for more technical
and logical issues.
10
Recently, Pelletier and Linsky (2018) and Uebel (2019) have considered verificationism in the
context of logical empiricism. In the introduction to the second edition, Ayer tried to refine the
idea of verification, but as is well-known, Alonzo Church’s (1949) review of that edition put the
final nail in LTL’s coffin, at least regarding verification. In the 1980s, Crispin Wright (1986)
reformulated the principle and rejected Church’s counterexamples. Ayer (1992, 302) later accepted
Wright’s proposal, though the debate did not end with that.
11
In fact, Ayer claims in LTL that there are no genuine philosophical propositions given that
sentences in philosophy cannot be true or false. They are not about the everyday usage of words (in
which case they would be empirical sentences), but about classes or types of expressions and thus
their purpose is merely clarificatory. Nonetheless, in his new introduction (LTL, 26), Ayer claims
that—contrary to the opinion of the Vienna Circle as he conceived it—philosophy does, after all,
have its own special propositions, which are either true or false.
synonymous with some other symbol, but by showing how the sentences
in which it significantly occurs can be translated into equivalent sen-
tences, which contain neither the definiendum itself, nor any of its syn-
onyms” (LTL, 60, original emphases). Consequently, using Russell’s
example, the symbol “the present king of France is bald” is defineable as
“there is one, and only one present king of France, and he is bald,” thereby
making explicit the hidden logical structure of the expression to show
that it is a description and not a referential phrase. While everybody
seems to know how to understand the symbol “the present king of
France,” revealing its logical structure might help us avoid unnecessary
conclusions that we are not entitled to draw (such as positing a fictitious
or subsistent entity that should constitute the present king of France). As
Ayer formulates this point,
Those who use the English language have no difficulty, in practice, in

identifying the situations which determine the truth and falsehood of such
simple statements as “This is a table,” or “Pennies are round.” But they may
very well be unaware of the hidden logical complexity of such statements
which our analysis of the notion of a material thing has just brought to
light. (LTL, 68)12
Philosophical analysis thus has the peculiar habit of starting from certain
obvious expressions, then demonstrating that their simplicity is only
apparent, before somewhat therapeutically dismissing the associated phil-
osophical problems by pointing out those features of the expressions that
were not visible before. “[T]he utility of the philosophical definition
which dispels such confusions,” concludes Ayer, “is not to be measured
by the apparent triviality of the sentences which it translates” (LTL, 68).
This reflects Russell’s previous credo from his logical atomist period,
12
In fact, a substantial part of the chapter on the nature of analysis is devoted to one example,
namely to the problem of how we can define material beings in terms of sense-contents (LTL,
63–68). Ayer tries to point out that talking about material things often conveys the idea that we are
dealing with a metaphysical (ontological) problem, when, in fact, this is a linguistic issue of
definitions in use. What is thus at stake here is how to translate (or reduce) material-things talk to
sense-contents talk, a program which is entirely consistent with Carnap’s approach from the
mid-1930s, especially as it was presented in Logical Syntax of Language (1934/1937) where he
argued that in the (only philosophically acceptable) formal mode of speech, we are not talking
about actual numbers, material things, and so on, but about number-words and thing-words.
16 A. T. Tuboly
namely that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple

as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical
that no one will believe it” (Russell 1918/2010, 20).
With surprising speed, at the end of the chapter, Ayer quickly discredits
some alternative conceptions of the nature of analysis. He claims (LTL,
68–69) that analysis is not about the sameness of meaning, given that
logical analysis is concerned with the establishment of logically equiva-
lent sentences (along the lines of the early Carnap, who required only the
equivalence of truth values in Aufbau and later in Syntax). He also dis-
misses those approaches that define the task of philosophy as identifying
“how certain symbols are actually used”—for in that case, philosophy
would make factual statements about the customs of speakers, while by
definition it should be concerned with logical relations and leave any
empirical issues to the empirical sciences (in this case, to sociology and
psychology).13
From general philosophy, Ayer moves toward his own form of
empiricism in the fourth chapter. His main concern is how empiricists
can account for two related major points, namely that mathematical and
logical statements seem to be meaningful but cannot be reduced to
empirical statements, while in his previously described theory of
meaningfulness, only weakly and in principle verifiable (empirical)
statements are cognitively meaningful. His solution is quite typical for
the logical positivists, namely that logical and mathematical statements
are analytic or tautological in nature. “A proposition is analytic,” Ayer
argues, “when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols
it contains, and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of
experience” (LTL, 78). Since logic and mathematics are devoid of
empirical content, Ayer is also able to explain their necessity: logic and
mathematics are necessary since “no experience can confute them” (LTL,
13
Ayer’s relation to ordinary language philosophy is the subject of the chapter by Siobhan Chapman
and Sally Parker-Ryan. What is rather more surprising is that Ayer did not account for all the
alternative conceptions that were explicitly in use by British philosophers. There is no mention of
Stebbing, Wisdom, or Duncan-Jones, who were known as the “Cambridge School of Analysis.”
The reason might be that around the time of writing LTL, Ayer dismissed the notion of “atomic
facts,” writing elsewhere that “I cannot help regarding this conception as a relic of metaphysical
realism” (Ayer 1936b, 58). Interestingly, in 1992, Ayer noted that the approach of LTL “was closer
to that of the Cambridge School of Analysis than that of the Vienna Circle” (Ayer 1992, 301).
79), and their truth is determined via formal criteria such as consistency.
Although they are factually empty, they do not belong to the realm of
metaphysics, as they govern the logic of our language.
Chapter 4 does not contain many references, especially not to the
logical positivists (Ayer mentions C.I. Lewis’ and Russell’s logical works,
along with Henri Poincaré), but at the end we find a note about Hans
Hahn’s “Logic, Mathematics, and Knowledge of Nature” (1933/1987)
pamphlet. In fact, Ayer’s chapter offers quite a nice summary of Hahn’s
main (historical and philosophical) points about the empiricists’ age-old
struggle with logic and mathematics; in their estimation these were
resolved in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Similar to Hahn, LTL’s Chap. 4 also
does not resort to any symbolism, derivations, or calculi, and instead
introduces the reader to the philosophy of the new logic by means of eas-
ily readable passages.14
Having addressed how we can determine the validity (and truth) of the
mathematical and logical domains, in Chap. 5 Ayer proceeds (or returns)
to the empirical realm. Since “an empirical proposition, or a system of
empirical propositions, may be free from contradiction, and still be false”
(LTL, 90), Ayer proposes that there must be material criteria according to
which the truth of empirical propositions can be determined. It is impor-
tant to note that Ayer talks about a criterion of truth; he thinks that
“truth” in itself is at least problematic; hence he neither wants to define
“truth” nor explain its nature. Ayer was a deflationist when it came to the
nature of truth, but he thought that we can and should say something
about the criterion of truth, that is, about how we can decide which sen-
tences are true and which are false. In the case of logic and mathematics,
the criterion is a formal issue (usually consistency), but in the case of
empirical ones, as we shall see, it is a more substantial material one.15
14
In the year LTL was published, Ayer took part in a symposium on “Truth by Convention” where
he presented a much more detailed discussion and the context of his views on logic and analyticity
(e.g. that a priori propositions about language are linguistic rules). In fact, he even discussed
Quine’s brand-new paper, “Truth by Convention,” and tried to disprove his arguments about the
circularity of logical conventionalism. See Ayer et al. (1936). In this volume, Nicole Rathgeb takes
up the topic of analyticity and logic. On pages 16–18 of the new introduction (1936/1946), Ayer
revised some elements of his earlier account.
15
On Ayer’s unique mixed theory of truth, see László Kocsis’ chapter in this volume.
18 A. T. Tuboly
Ayer argues against the idea that empirical propositions consist of two
subsets, namely those that are absolutely certain, which, with some
references to Schlick and Juhos, he refers to as ostensive propositions, and
those that are hypothetical and therefore refutable. According to Ayer,
ostensive propositions that only aim to register sensations with absolute
certainty are impossible, since empirical propositions always also involve
descriptive elements (LTL, 90–91). (Apart from some of the details of his
reasoning about why “in principle”-like ostensive propositions are not
possible, Ayer’s ideas about the necessarily descriptive character of
empirical propositions—prohibiting pure registrations—are quite similar
to the arguments that Wilfrid Sellars used to attack Ayer’s later
phenomenalism.)
After noting that absolutely certain ostensive propositions are
impossible, Ayer goes on to claim that empirical propositions “are one
and all [all of them] hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discredited
in actual sense-experience” (LTL, 94). As experience may affect any
hypothesis (if we say that experience cannot refute a give proposition p,
then p is simply a definition, see LTL, 95), Ayer also formulates the
following thesis about conventionalism (which was made famous by
Quine, but goes back to Poincaré, Neurath, and even Carnap), namely
that “the ‘facts of experience’ can never compel us to abandon a hypothesis.
A man can always sustain his convictions in the face of apparently hostile
evidence if he is prepared to make the necessary ad hoc assumptions”
(LTL, 95).
If any empirical hypotheses can be dropped (or can be maintained
with the required reservations and modifications), what is the material
criterion that determines their validity? Ayer’s answer is functionality, by
which he means that “we test the validity of an empirical hypothesis by
seeing whether it actually fulfils the function which it is designed to ful-
fil” (LTL, 95). For Ayer, the goal of science is mainly the prediction of
future experiences, thus the validity of empirical hypotheses is to be
determined by their ability to anticipate future experiences. Therefore,
according to Ayer, “if an observation for which a given proposition is
relevant conforms to our expectations, the truth of that proposition is
confirmed” (LTL, 95), or in other words, “its probability has been
increased,” and if the reverse happens, “its probability has been

diminished.”
To complete his overarching argument that “all synthetic propositions
are empirical hypotheses” (LTL, 102), in Chap. 6 Ayer sets himself the
task of accounting for value statements (both moral and aesthetical ones,
as well as theological discourse). He finds both reductive and non-
reductive theories lacking: the former reduce our value talk to something
non-evaluative, that is, to empirical facts, namely “good” to “social or
personal approval,” while the latter claim that moral notions are
unanalyzable and can thus be apprehended via an unspecified and
mysterious “intellectual intuition” (LTL, 104–107). Ayer argues that
reductive theories are wrong because “it is not self-contradictory to assert
that some actions which are generally approved of are not right” (LTL,
104), while non-reductive theories (he calls them “absolutist”) are
unverifiable. Ayer also, somewhat weakly, claims that since we have made
such great use of verification regarding synthetic statements, it “would
undermine the whole of our main argument” if it turns out that ethical
statements are factual but unverifiable (LTL, 106).
In so doing, Ayer thus tries to find a middle position. If ethical terms
are reducible to empirical facts, then they are of concern to sociologists
and psychologists but not to philosophers; ethical concepts are also unan-
alyzable for Ayer (as they are for absolutists), but his reason is that they
are “mere pseudo-concepts” (LTL, 107). They add nothing to an empiri-
cal proposition; if you say that “You acted wrongly by stealing that
money,” you add nothing to the empirical and verifiable content of the
judgment, but you are “simply evincing [your] moral disapproval of it.”
Normative ethical statements describe nothing about the empirical
world; by making them, we are “merely expressing certain moral senti-
ments” (LTL, 107) rather than truth-apt, factual sentences that have cog-
nitive content. Furthermore, they might arouse feelings and induce
others to carry out certain actions and even take the form of a command.
Ethical statements, and value statements in general, “are unverifiable for
the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable—
because they do not express genuine propositions” (LTL, 108–109).
With this radical view under his belt, Ayer quickly caused a stir at
Oxford and beyond. Perhaps more than anything else, his ethical views
20 A. T. Tuboly
were misrepresented, which convinced a broad audience that the book

was nothing but the harsh opinions of a young man, rebelling against the
moral distinctness of British academic and public life.16
If they did not cause the same startled and emotional reactions among
philosophers, Ayer’s views on other minds were nevertheless of a similarly
radical nature. Knowledge of other minds and the human self (including
its ontological status) occupies a distinguished place in British philoso-
phy (dating back, at least, to Locke and Hume), and thus it was only
natural for Ayer to dedicate an entire chapter to these issues.17 Two points
shall be emphasized here. First, as philosophy is a linguistic undertaking,
there is no philosophical problem of mind and matter beyond “the lin-
guistic problems of defining certain symbols which denote logical con-
structions in terms of symbols which denote sense-contents” (LTL, 124).
Ayer thus believes that the traditional problem of mind-body relations is
a pseudo-problem that arises from the misconceived nature of philosoph-
ical analysis and a certain predilection to metaphysical speculation. This
argumentation nicely echoes Carnap’s way of utilizing the formal mode
of speech to turn substantial traditional problems into linguistic issues.
Nonetheless, on the British philosophical scene, metaphysicians and clas-
sical British empiricists (whose treatment of minds and bodies operated
on a certain psychological basis that goes back to Hume), this linguistic
view caused quite a stir.
Secondly, Ayer proposed a somewhat radical view of other minds. He
denied that we have any extrasensory or peculiar intellectual (or intuitive)
access to other minds; the only option is an empirical one: he defines
other minds on the basis of their empirical manifestations, which are
16
C.E.M. Joad and Giles Romilly argued that Ayer’s book captivated the minds of students and
helped to fill a moral vacuum in which Fascist students could wield the book as their philosophical
Bible by appealing to the erosion of absolute moral values. On these problems, see Aaron Preston’s
chapter in this volume and Tuboly (2020b). On Ayer’s ethical views and some of their historical
parallels, see Krisztián Pete’s chapter in this volume. It should be noted that while Ayer did not
revise his ethical views in the new introduction, he did concede that the theory was “very summary,”
and that readers should turn to C.L. Stevenson’s relevant writings for details (LTL, 20). On Ayer,
Stevenson and ethics in logical empiricism, see Capps (2017).
17
Some of this literature (also that concerning solipsism) is discussed in Thomas Uebel’s chapter.
The fact that John Wisdom devoted numerous papers in Mind to the problem of other minds in
the early 1940s, which were later republished as a monograph, indicates the relevance of the
problem; see Wisdom (1952).
analyzed into basic sense-contents (LTL, 130). However, there may be a

problem here. As Ayer wrote,
[i]t must not be thought that this reduction of other people’s experiences
to one’s own in any way involves a denial of their reality. Each of us must
define the experiences of the others in terms of what he can at least in prin-
ciple observe, but this does not mean that each of us must regard all the
others as so many robots. (LTL, 130)
Even though we do not have direct access to other minds, and we can
therefore not establish their consciousness in this way, it does not follow
for Ayer that everyone else is just a robot exemplifying certain behavioral
patterns. How then can we distinguish robots from conscious human
beings? “[T]he distinction between a conscious man and an unconscious
machine resolves itself into a distinction between different types of per-
ceptible behaviour” (LTL, 130). In other words, all we have to go on is
perceptible behavior (linguistic and otherwise), and we must make a
decision based on that. If something “fails to satisfy one of the empirical
tests,” then it can be classified as a “dummy.” As Ayer concludes, “[i]f I
know that an object behaves in every way as a conscious being must, by
definition, behave, then I know that is really conscious” (ibid.). This is a
highly radical, though elegant solution. We might expect him to say more
about the identification of consciousness, but in the end, all we can rely
on are empirically accessible data. For Ayer, that was enough; for others,
presumably not.
Ayer denied that philosophy has anything to say about the world’s
basic furniture—in fact, he moved the classical topics of philosophy
toward the linguistic-definitional playground. This is, of course, a quite
radical interpretation of Ayer’s work; nonetheless, as his move, a few years
later, into the territory of traditional philosophy shows, Ayer indeed
emptied the important topics of philosophy to some extent.18
LTL ends with a chapter on “outstanding philosophical debates.” With
his usual self-confidence, Ayer claims that by putting the methods and
18
Gergely Ambrus and Thomas Uebel’s chapter discusses Ayer’s treatment of other minds, and they
also show how Ayer changed his fundamental views about philosophy, analysis, other minds and
phenomenalism between 1936 (LTL) and 1940 (Foundations of Empirical Knowledge).
22 A. T. Tuboly
tools of LTL to work, all problems of philosophy can be definitively

solved. In fact, their solution is quite easy in the sense that there cannot
be any debates within philosophy, at least in the usual sense. A prerequisite
for a debate is the possibility of reliable evidence that could support the
opposing standpoints. But “the function of the philosopher is not to
devise speculative theories which require to be validated in experience,
but to elicit the consequences of our linguistic usages” (LTL, 133). Put
differently, since there is no actual empirical evidence that could substan-
tiate any philosophical claims, any meaningful debate of the classical top-
ics of philosophy is impossible.
But there is hope: Ayer distinguishes between the empirical, logical,
and metaphysical parts of questions; the empirical parts (if there are any)
belong to the sciences (as he demonstrated in the passages about syn-
thetic a posteriori propositions); the metaphysical parts turn out to be
meaningless, as no meaning can be attributed to them on an empiricist
basis. Finally, for Ayer, the logical parts of the disputed claims are linguis-
tic questions that need to be decided by linguistic analysis, as he defined
in the third and fourth chapter. He presents three case studies about
rationalism/empiricism, idealism/realism, and monism/pluralism and
tries to achieve a certain degree of consensus (by rejecting parts of their
claims while upholding others).
Ayer accepts the rationalists’ claim that scientific theories are often
validated deductively; that is, their scientific claims, for example about
laws, are formulated intuitively or by other means, and not arrived at
inductively from particular cases as others, among them Hume, main-
tain. But Ayer also notes that while “scientific laws are often discovered
through a process of intuition, this does not mean that they can be intui-
tively validated” (LTL, 137). At this point, Ayer makes use of the famous
“context of discovery” and “context of justification” distinction,
subsuming important insights of the rationalists under “discovery,” while
reserving “justification” for validation by empirical substantiation.
It goes without saying that the community of philosophers did not
accept Ayer’s results regarding the solution of philosophical disputes, and
neither did Ayer accept it for long. Only a few years later, already in The
Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), Ayer changed his opinion
about many points and gave himself over to the new (or better, traditional)
debates. In fact, an interesting parallel could be drawn here with

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Not just because of their ambition to solve
philosophical problems all at once and conclusively, but also because LTL
can be regarded as a ladder that is to be thrown away. At the very end of
his book, Ayer admits that the distinction between science and philoso-
phy is “misleading” (153), since science and philosophy are one (LTL,
151). Science has speculative and logical parts—the former belong to the
actual sciences, while the latter are typically the objects of philosophers.
For Ayer, philosophy “must develop into the logic of science” and phi-
losophers should analyze scientific symbols. “What we must recognise is
that it is necessary for a philosopher to become a scientist, in this sense,”
Ayer notes (LTL, 153), “if he is to make any substantial contribution
towards the growth of human knowledge.” In pursuing this task, philoso-
phers, or logicians of science, will find few clues in LTL; however, as a
work of recultivation, it clears the path for future research by redefining
both the territory and the method of philosophy.
1.3.2 T
he Controversy Surrounding the Significance
and Influence of LTL
Determining the significance and influence of any given book is a

complex problem that I will not attempt to solve here. The individual
chapters of this volume offer their own results and considerations on the
matter, but the history of how Ayer’s work has been received allows for
some preliminary observations.
Mary Warnock (1960, 86) once wrote that “[n]o doubt Ayer aimed to
upset people, and he admirably succeeded.” This suggests that Ayer’s sig-
nificance can be measured both in negative terms (from the viewpoint of
those who were upset) and in positive terms (from the perspective of
those who were happy to upset others). Furthermore, to assess the role
that Ayer’s LTL played in the history of early analytic philosophy, it is
advisable to always also keep an eye on the logical empiricists.
During the last few decades, it has been argued that logical empiricism
was a political movement that was socially engaged to empower the
masses through their scientific works (Romizi 2012). Nonetheless, while
24 A. T. Tuboly
Ayer was seemingly aware of at least some of the socially relevant aspects
of the Vienna Circle (see Ayer 1978, 129–130), LTL was more modest
and rather academic in its (social) goals and formulations. As such, after
the first edition, its main points only attracted the attention of “a fairly
narrow circle of some professional philosophers,” and Ayer’s public break-
through (which characterized his entire later career) only came after the
Second World War, in the wake of his appearances on the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s popular The Brains Trust program
(Honderich 1991, 210).
While the book was unsurprisingly divisive among professionals,
students seem to have mastered its main points with relative ease. Perhaps
because of its fascinating style, its accessibility, and its fresh and charming
modernity, which was similar to other manifestos against aging professors
and the rigid academic hierarchy, “it was read with breathless excitement
by every student of philosophy in Oxford” (Medawar 1988, 53). At one
occasion, A.D. Lindsay—philosopher, Master of Balliol and Vice-
President of Oxford in the mid-1930s—led a discussion group where
students raised the possibility of reading Ayer’s book; Lindsay became
angry and theatrically hurled the book out of a window in response
(Rogers 1999, 124). Like it or not, almost everyone at the time had an
opinion about LTL and “only a few can [argue] that they never, even
briefly, fell under its spell. For many the affair was brief, ending in disil-
lusionment” (Macdonald and Wright 1986a, 1).
The book has numerous epistemic, or internal, virtues, including
simplicity, lucidity, readability, freshness, force, persuasiveness, euphony,
shortness, denseness, and perhaps most importantly, clarity. At one point,
even Ayer (1978, 154) acknowledged that the book “can be accused of
sacrificing depth to clarity.” While all these virtues can be praised for their
own sake, contemporaries and later commentators alike connected LTL’s
internal merits with the documentation of modern logical and scientific
philosophy that originated partly from the Continent. Anthony Quinton
formulated this as follows:
Presenting the ideas of Vienna Circle in British costume [Ayer] extricated

them from the lavish use of symbolism, the off-putting technical terms and
the computer-like detachment of Carnap’s writing. More in the manner of
Schlick he conceived the philosopher to be, however doctrinally subversive,

a citizen of the republic of letters. Also like Schlick, who wrote an article on
the Vienna Circle and traditional philosophy, he drew attention to the
many anticipations in the philosophy of the past of the ideas he was
expounding. (Quinton 1991, 40)
For anyone looking to get acquainted with logical empiricism, Ayer’s LTL
appeared to be the best option. Though Schlick had presented his Form
and Content lectures in London in 1932, they were only published post-
humously several years later (first in 1938). Carnap’s Philosophy and
Logical Syntax lectures were available (his talks were first presented in a
long but neutral report by Maund and Reeves in 1934), but it could be
argued that they were entirely unconnected to the British scene. In fact,
Carnap’s booklet was written in a general and understandable way, con-
sidered many fields (even ethics), but never even came close to the degree
of recognition that LTL achieved.19 Finally, there was one more candi-
date, namely Julius Weinberg’s An Examination of Logical Positivism
(1936; actually printed in 1937). Though Weinberg was American, the
book was printed in England as part of C.K. Ogden’s International Library
of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method (the same series that
included Carnap’s Syntax and Max Black’s The Nature of Mathematics). It
covered similar topics, but under headings that were presumably more
familiar to readers of positivism: “scientific method,” “induction,”
“physicalism,” “syntax,” and “natural laws.” Weinberg also nicely captured
the diversity of the Vienna Circle by devoting different chapters to
Carnap, Schlick, and Neurath. And even more importantly, Weinberg’s
book offered not just a friendly introduction, but also a critical
examination, critical of the Vienna Circle and critical for it, trying to
improve some of its basic ideas about language and knowledge. The book
had almost as many reviews as Ayer’s, and though most of them were
sympathetic to the critical approach (hailing also the historical sections),
it was not able to gain a foothold in the canon of analytic philosophy.
19
Carnap’s German paper, “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft” was
translated into English by Max Black as “The Unity of Science,” with a new introduction by Carnap
(1934), but it did not reach the mainstream in a similar fashion as LTL did.
26 A. T. Tuboly
In addition, external conditions also contributed to the formation of

LTL’s legendary status and rising. Let us quote Quinton once more:
The elements [of LTL] may be borrowed but they are admirably arranged.
After Our Knowledge of the External World Russell’s books became increas-
ingly loose and casual in construction. That can presumably be attributed
to the loss of self-confidence caused by Wittgenstein’s ruthless criticism.
Moore’s laborious repetitiveness and his confinement to a minute range of
topics, however strategically important, was unsatisfying in a different way.
The Tractatus, with pretty well all the argument left out, hovers about on
either side of the frontier of intelligibility. Ramsey’s small, brilliant Nachlass
was, in its more philosophically interesting parts, largely rough notes.
Broad and Price were admirably lucid and thorough and Price’s writing had
a particular kind of charm. But they were not, as Ayer unquestionably was,
exciting. (Quinton 1991, 40)
Taking Quinton’s description seriously, Ayer could be said to have been

at the right place at the right time. He filled a void that haunted British
philosophy in the mid-1930s. LTL caused excitement for taking seriously
the national heritage of British analysts, for translating the new move-
ments from the Continent into an understandable language and frame of
reference, and, importantly, for doing so in a new and fresh philosoph-
ical way.
Obviously, not everyone was pleased by Ayer’s efforts. Some of the
same characteristics of the book that many saw as positive and modern
virtues of scientific writing were deemed to be negative and destructive
features by others. Putting it differently, the positive properties of the
book were transformed into major defects. Simplicity thus became silli-
ness; lucidity was turned into sloppiness; persuasiveness and force into
aggressivity; denseness into complicatedness; clarity into emptiness; and
freshness into negligence. As S.R. Sutherland (1991, 78) noted by way of
a general charge against LTL, “the book is conceptually restrictive, indeed,
intellectually imperialistic in its character.”
Nevertheless, it is worth examining at least one of these charges in
detail. It has often been claimed (not just against Ayer, but against logical
empiricism in general) that scientific philosophies are not deep enough;
they frequently stop short, make general (and thus either ambiguous or
almost empty) statements and draw connections that are not worked out
with sufficient care to support their case. In other words, Ayer’s book has
been called simplistic (to say the least) because it aims to dissolve philo-
sophical troubles without considering the nuances of the positions in
question; and it is considered dangerous because it repudiates the old
traditions and conventions of making philosophy by reducing them to
the abstract and general considerations of the sciences. In this view, truth
lies in the depths and philosophers must delve into the darkness to mine
the essence of thought. We find nothing like that in LTL, of course.
But that might be not at all accidental. Even though Ayer did not read
the manifesto of the Circle (or at least there is no indication that he did
in LTL or anywhere else around the time he wrote it), he may have been
aware of the logical empiricists’ contention that “neatness and clarity are
striven for, and dark distances and unfathomable depths rejected. In sci-
ence, there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere” (Carnap, Hahn,
Neurath 1929/1973, 306), and the same could be said for philosophy.
Entering the undefined, subjective, and shadowy depths is dangerous—
as such, “depth” is a risky term that can easily be used to dismiss
unappealing views as “not deep enough.” Ayer may have known about
and internalized this contention of the Circle so that questions of depth
had no relevance for him at all.20
Be that as it may, the influence of LTL can be measured on two
grounds. First, it was quite negatively received by the philosophical com-
munity, as it stepped on many toes and produced a mainly critical
response among both philosophers and public intellectuals. There were
many sympathetic voices, of course, but no one followed Ayer’s track
explicitly and directly. And neither can it be said that Ayer prepared the
ground for the incoming logical empiricists (as Charles Morris,
W.V.O. Quine, Ernest Nagel and others did in the United States). Though
Otto Neurath lived and worked in England between 1941 and 1945, he
was usually introduced as a social scientist, a pedagogue, and museum
20
Later in the introduction to his collected volume on Logical Positivism, Ayer (1959, 4) devoted
some passages to the manifesto, though the question of depth remained unnoticed. Nonetheless,
for the significance of how Carnap and Neurath developed a socio-politically sensitive conception
above the depths on the intersubjective surface of discourse, see Uebel (2020).
28 A. T. Tuboly
director with an interest in positivism; furthermore, he was unable to find

a natural place for himself and his thought within the philosophy com-
munity. Friedrich Waismann was more fortunate, institutionally speak-
ing; though he had to leave Cambridge because of his incompatibility
with Wittgenstein, he moved on to Oxford where he was made a profes-
sor. He was always recognized as a close follower of Wittgenstein and as
someone who practiced philosophy along similar lines to Ryle and other
British linguistic analysts. There is nothing particularly logical empiricist
about his career.21 Seemingly, Ayer was not that successful after all in
preparing the ground for logical empiricists in the years that followed,
and they would thus not be due for a free harvest of philosophical fame
and success, so to speak.
On the other hand, Ayer’s book was more than successful in other
ways. LTL is one of the best-selling philosophy books of the twentieth
century; every student of analytic philosophy has to read it at least once
(never mind whether it is served up as a good or as a bad example), and
many educated laymen know it as a source of inspiration and a seminal
text from the intellectual history of positivism—a distinction shared by
only a few books in analytic philosophy. Whether institutional success is
enough for philosophical success, however, is a different question.
1.3.3 LTL and Its Representation of the Vienna Circle
There is one question that still remains to be discussed: does LTL deserve
its fame as the most understandable, approachable, and clear presenta-
tion of logical empiricism in general, and the Vienna Circle in particular?
Or, as the book was introduced in 1937, “a friendly exposition of a fin-
ished philosophical position, without reference to the line of its develop-
ment, the problems out of which it had its genesis, the questions it leaves
untouched, the difficulties it originates; a sort of diminutive summa, or
doctrinaire text” (Konvitz 1937, 285). Even in his 1959 collection of
Logical Positivism, Ayer (1959, 8) claimed that he represented in LTL
21
Waismann is also quite underrated in the history of logical empiricism. Presumably, this will soon
change, see Makovec and Shapiro (2019).
“what may be called the classical position of the Vienna Circle.”22 In his
recent contribution to the “Central Works in Philosophy,” Barry Gower
(2006, 195) claims that “[LTL] remains the best short introduction to an
influential, if controversial, version of ideas associated with logical posi-
tivism.” Gower is, however, justifiably more cautious regarding the
strength of the connection that is to be drawn between LTL and logical
positivism. The same goes for the answer that we provide in this volume,
which, of course, also has to be scrutinized.
What is interesting is that almost no member of the Vienna Circle ever
referred to LTL in their published writings, and no reviews appeared
(from internal members of the movement)23 in the years following the
first edition. In 1936, Feigl noted in a letter to Schlick that Ayer’s book
had recently been published, but as the “style and terminology is not
always fortunate,” he was afraid that the book would “not help our cause
in the manner as I wished before” (Herbert Feigl to Moritz Schlick, May
20, 1936). We do not know whether “our cause” referred to logical
empiricism more generally (the propagation of a sort of scientific concep-
tion of the world) or to Feigl and Schlick’s Wittgenstein-inspired and
restricted form of positivism in particular. It is certainly true, however,
that Ayer was quite critical of Schlick’s views, which is why Feigl may
have had their own “cause” in mind.24 Interestingly, Feigl (1969/1981,
71) later hit a more positive tone and wrote that Ayer’s “aggressive and
extremely well-written book […] contributed greatly to the propagation
of the Viennese views, especially those of Carnap, Wittgenstein, and
Schlick, in the English-speaking world.” Before reading the book, pre-
sumably based on their personal meetings and on conferences that they
had attended together, Neurath wrote happily to Ayer that “I hope to
read [LTL] in the near future as a document of the International Logical
22
One shall take notice of the fact that even though Ayer’s (1959) introduction to Logical Positivism
still contains many oversimplifications, it is a way better and more detailed (both philosophically
and historically) introduction to the Vienna Circle than LTL ever was.
23
This qualification is required since two associates of the Circle did publish short reviews. The
Berliner Olaf Helmer (1937/1938) wrote a positive (though mainly neutral), summary-like review,
and the other short but positive note came from the American Ernest Nagel (1936b).
24
On the differences between the Feigl-Schlick and Neurath-Carnap wings of the Circle, see
Verhaegh (2020) and Tuboly (2021).
30 A. T. Tuboly
Empiricism Movement and I am glad that we have you as one of us”

(Neurath to Ayer, January 18, 1936, ONN).
In their introduction to Ayer’s Festschrifts, Graham Macdonald and
Crispin Wright (1986a, 1) summarized the internal reactions of the
Circle (the Circle as they conceived it) by stating that “[i]t does not seem
likely that the members of the Vienna Circle had realized what brilliant
advocacy their leading doctrines were about to receive.” People outside
the movement, however, were much more aware of this promotional
boost, perhaps based on somewhat loaded opinions. Mary Warnock
(1960, 79) claimed, for example, that LTL provided the “most brilliant
exposition [of logical positivism].”
Around the time of the publication of LTL and even in the decades
that followed, there was a multitude of opposing views on this issue. Of
course, much depends on how we conceive logical empiricism in the first
place. According to the so-called received view, the logical empiricists
were a well-defined group that consisted of some scientists-turned-
philosophers who were dogmatic, intellectualist, and looked for a fight
wherever they suspected anything metaphysical, purging the world of its
moral and religious character, and most importantly, doing so in a math-
ematical language that is only intelligible to the initiated. If we take this
old attitude to logical empiricism, then with his clear, common-sense
formulations, Ayer was indeed a leading candidate to represent the move-
ment in England. Furthermore, he was known for his combativeness,
aggressivity, and his quest to eradicate moral and religious talk from the
meaningful canon of life.
Nevertheless, the logical empiricists were anything but a well-defined
group; even though there were some efforts to bundle its members under
a common and definitive banner from time to time, they always turned
out to be vain. The Vienna Circle was highly divided along the lines of
politics, social engagement, the nature of philosophy and language, the
nature and role of basic sentences, and the possibilities of unified science.
Almost everything its members wrote about had its advocates and critics
within the group. Representing such a diverse group by way of a small
and simplified book seems to be an impossible task. However, in Ayer’s
favor, it can be argued that as a matter of fact, some of the logical empiri-
cists (Carnap and especially Neurath) made great efforts to depict their
movement as a close group of allies with some minor in-house quarrels

about the details. Even though Susan Stebbing (1935, 500) recognized
quite early the internal divergences among the Circle (and claimed that
the in-house “lack of consistency […] may even be a sign of vitality”), its
fame (in the 1930s and 40s) was still bound to the idea of being the
Viennese school of positivists. Thus, Ayer was arguably justified in pre-
senting a general and unified account, and readers of his book naturally
viewed it as doing just that.
But even if we do accept this somewhat simplified, united picture of
logical empiricism, and that Ayer skillfully presented the major and defi-
nite lines of that straw man, there are still two more issues that can and
should be raised. First of all, if logical empiricism is known for anything,
it is its contribution to logical analysis, philosophy of science, and how it
transformed philosophy into a technical field. In fact, none of these
qualities are to be found in LTL (except for a few passages, as noted above
in Sect. 1.3.1). When Ayer was in Vienna, he wrote to Ryle that “the
problems of pure logistic do not interest me very much” (Harré and
Shosky 1999, 32). Although certain members of the Circle (like Neurath
and Frank) feared the technical obsession of Carnap and others, the
technical matters of logic (and metalogic) were always in the foreground
when it came to solving philosophical problems. Although Ayer claimed,
at the end of LTL (153), that philosophy has to become the logic of
science, his book instead served up a general linguistic analysis that was,
however, neither too Carnapian nor too Schlickian/Wittgensteinian.
Just as there is no logic in LTL (besides some very general remarks
about the philosophical nature of logic as a tool for making explicit the
implications of our sentences and their relation to one another), there is
also no mathematics in the book, and not a single word about the com-
plex and long-standing debate on the foundations of mathematics. As
Ayer (1978, 163) later admitted (seemingly without any regret), “I had
little skill in mathematics and no scientific training.” His lack of scientific
knowledge was a substantial issue. As I have noted already, LTL ends with
the revelation that philosophers should restrict their attention to the sci-
ences, as only the sentences of the latter are literally meaningful. The logi-
cal empiricists did not have any problem with this. Most of them were
trained as physicists, sociologists, legal scholars, or mathematicians.
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MASTERPIECES OF THE MASTERS OF FICTION ***
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MASTERPIECES OF THE
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LIFE OF OLIVER P. MORTON
MAYA (A Romance in Prose)
PROTEAN PAPERS
ANNOTATED TRANSLATION OF
HISTORY OF THE LANGOBARDS
BY PAUL THE DEACON
MAYA (A Dramatic Poem)
DOROTHY DAY
MASTERPIECES OF THE
MASTERS OF FICTION
BY
WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE
NEW YORK
THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
William Dudley Foulke
MASTERPIECES OF THE
MASTERS OF FICTION
PREFACE
A short time ago I determined that instead of taking up any new

works of fiction I would go over the masterpieces which I had read
long since and see what changes time had made in my impressions
of them. To do this I chose some forty of the most distinguished
authors and decided to select one story from each,—the best one, if
I could make up my mind which that was—at all events, one which
stood in the first rank of his productions. I determined to read these
in succession, one after another, in the shortest time possible, and
thus get a comprehensive notion of the whole. Of course under such
conditions exhaustive criticism would be out of the question, but I
thought that the general perspective and the comparative merits and
faults of each work would appear more vividly in this manner than in
any other way.
The productions of living authors were discarded, as well as all

fiction in verse.
Arranged chronologically, the selections I made were as follows:
1535 Rabelais “Gargantua”

1605-
Cervantes “Don Quixote”
1615
1715-
Le Sage “Gil Blas”
1735
1719 Defoe “Robinson Crusoe”
1726 Swift “Gulliver’s Travels”
1733 Prévost “Manon Lescaut”
1749 Fielding “Tom Jones”
1759 Johnson “Rasselas”
1759 Voltaire “Candide”
1759-
Sterne “Tristram Shandy”
1767
“The Vicar of
1766 Goldsmith
Wakefield”
“The Sorrows of
1774 Goethe
Young Werther”
1787 Saint Pierre “Paul and Virginia”
1807 Chateaubriand “Atala”
“Pride and
1813 Austen
Prejudice”
1813 Fouqué “Undine”
1814 Chamisso “Peter Schlemihl”
“The Legend of
1820 Irving
Sleepy Hollow”
1820 Scott “Ivanhoe”
1827 Manzoni “The Betrothed”
1835 Balzac “Eugenie Grandet”
1841 Gogol “Dead Souls”
“The Three
1845 Dumas
Guardsmen”
1847 Brontë “Jane Eyre”
1847 Merimée “Carmen”
1850 Dickens “David Copperfield”
1850 Hawthorne “The Scarlet Letter”
1852 Thackeray “Henry Esmond”
1852 Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
1853 Gaskell “Cranford”
1856 Auerbach “Barfüssele”
1857 Von Scheffel “Ekkehard”
“The Romance of a
1857 Feuillet
Poor Young Man”
1857 Flaubert “Madame Bovary”
“The Ordeal of
1859 Meredith
Richard Feverel”
“The Cloister and the
1861 Reade
Hearth”
1862 Hugo “Les Misérables”
1863 Eliot “Romola”
“Crime and
1866 Dostoyevsky
Punishment”
1868 Turgenieff “Smoke”
1869 Blackmore “Lorna Doone”
1878 Tolstoi “Anna Karenina”
1883 Stevenson “Treasure Island”
I think I see many picking out here and there a name, and hear them
saying, “What a bad selection! Wilkie Collins ought to be in the list
rather than Charles Reade; ‘Vanity Fair’ ought to be in the place of
‘Henry Esmond,’ ‘Waverly’ in the place of ‘Ivanhoe’,” etc., etc. But if
we except two or three names like Manzoni and Gogol, who are not
yet estimated at their full value by English and American readers, I
think common opinion will justify, in a general way, my catalogue of
authors, and I feel sure that the works chosen, if not the
masterpieces, are at least fairly typical of each.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface 5
Rabelais “Gargantua” 11
Cervantes “Don Quixote” 16
Le Sage “Gil Blas” 25
Defoe “Robinson Crusoe” 36
Swift “Gulliver’s Travels” 39
Prévost “Manon Lescaut” 43
Fielding “Tom Jones” 45
Johnson “Rasselas” 49
Voltaire “Candide” 55
Sterne “Tristram Shandy” 60
“The Vicar of
Goldsmith 64
Wakefield”
“The Sorrows of
Goethe 72
Young Werther”
Saint Pierre “Paul and Virginia” 76
Chateaubriand “Atala” 79
Austen “Pride and Prejudice” 82
Fouqué “Undine” 93
Chamisso “Peter Schlemihl” 95
Irving “The Legend of 99
Sleepy Hollow”
Scott “Ivanhoe” 101
Manzoni “The Betrothed” 107
Balzac “Eugenie Grandet” 125
Gogol “Dead Souls” 130
“The Three
Dumas 132
Guardsmen”
Brontë “Jane Eyre” 134
Merimée “Carmen” 138
Dickens “David Copperfield” 141
Hawthorne “The Scarlet Letter” 150
Thackeray “Henry Esmond” 158
Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 176
Gaskell “Cranford” 180
Auerbach “Barfüssele” 183
Von Scheffel “Ekkehard” 189
“The Romance of a
Feuillet 192
Poor Young Man”
Flaubert “Madame Bovary” 194
“The Ordeal of
Meredith 196
Richard Feverel”
“The Cloister and the
Reade 200
Hearth”
Hugo “Les Misérables” 209
Eliot “Romola” 215
“Crime and
Dostoyevsky 228
Punishment”
Turgenieff “Smoke” 231
Blackmore “Lorna Doone” 237
Tolstoi “Anna Karenina” 240
Stevenson “Treasure Island” 267
GARGANTUA
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
Coleridge classed Rabelais among the greatest creative minds of the

world, with Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, etc. Not many will be
found to-day who will agree with such an estimate. Rabelais himself
would perhaps laugh at it as heartily as he laughed at the vices and
foibles of his time.
“Gargantua,” a burlesque romance, is the biography of a good-

natured giant of that name, the son of King Grangousier, who is born
in a remarkable manner out of the left ear of Gargamelle, his mother.
The author expresses a doubt whether his readers will thoroughly
believe the truth of this strange nativity, but says that it is not
impossible with God, and that there is nothing in the Bible against it.
He cites the examples of other prodigies and declares that he is not
so impudent a liar as Pliny was in treating of strange births. Then
follow many absurd and farcical descriptions of the conduct and
apparel of the infant giant, his colors and liveries, his wooden
horses, and the silly instruction given to him by foolish sophisters. In
Paris he steals the bells of Notre Dame to adorn the neck of the
hideous great mare upon whose back he has travelled thither, and
Master Janotus is sent to him to pronounce a great oration, imploring
the return of the bells. This nonsensical speech is a laughable
potpourri of French, Latin, and gibberish. The bells are returned, and
now Gargantua submits himself to the government of his new tutor,
Ponocrates, who establishes a novel system of instruction for his big
pupil.
The book gives a detailed description of the ingenious division of

time made by this wise preceptor, so that every moment of the day
might be devoted to the acquisition of some useful branch of
knowledge.
A strife arises between the shepherds of the country and some cake-
bakers of the neighboring kingdom of Lerne. The cake-bakers, being
worsted, complain to Picrochole, their king, who collects an army
and invades the country of Grangousier, pillaging and ravaging
everywhere. But when the invaders come to steal the grapes of the
convent of Seville, the stout Friar John with his “staff of the cross”
lays about him energetically dealing death and destruction on every
side. Picrochole storms the rock and castle of Clermond, and news
is brought to Grangousier of the invasion. The good old king at first
tries to conciliate his neighbor, and sends him a great abundance of
cakes and other gifts, but the choleric Picrochole will not retire,
though he keeps everything that is sent to him. The Duke of
Smalltrash, the Earl of Swashbuckler, and Captain Durtaille
persuade him that he is about to conquer the world, and there is a
long burlesque catalogue of all the countries they are to subdue,
after which they will return, sit down, rest and be merry. But the wise
Echephron, another of the king’s counsellors, tells him that it will be
more prudent to take their rest and enjoyment at once and not wait
till they have conquered the world. Meanwhile Gargantua is sent
forth against Picrochole. The enemy’s artillery has so little power
against him that he combs the cannonballs out of his hair. Among
other episodes, he unwittingly eats up six pilgrims in a salad, but one
of them strikes the nerve of a hollow tooth in his mouth, upon which
he takes them all out again. They escape, and then one of them
shows the others how their adventure had been foretold by the
Prophet David in the Psalms.
There is much droll conversation at a feast given by Gargantua to

Friar John. The stout friar has many adventures, and plays an
important part in the attack upon Picrochole’s army, when the poor
choleric king flees in disguise and at last becomes a porter at Lyons.
Here he is as testy and pettish as ever, and hopes for the fulfillment
of a prophecy that he should be restored to his kingdom “at the
coming of the Cocklicranes,” who it seems could never come at all.
Gargantua proclaims amnesty to the vanquished, the spoil is divided

and Friar John rewarded by the establishment of the Abbey of
Theleme, which is filled with all beautiful things and inhabited by fair
knights and ladies who keep no hours nor vigils, take no vows, but
enjoy the delights of liberty under the rule, “Do what thou wilt,”
spurred by their own instincts to virtuous actions and with no
temptation to transgress the laws.
In a very attractive prologue to this strange medley, the author sets

our curiosity agog with the simile of a philosophical dog and a
marrow bone, telling his readers to break the bone and suck out the
allegorical sense “or the things proposed to be signified by these
Pythagorical symbols.” So the world has been trying very hard ever
since to guess whether Gargantua was Francis I of France or Henry
d’Albret of Navarre; whether Friar John was Cardinal Chatillon or
Martin Luther, or both together; whether Picrochole was Charles V or
someone else; whether the cake-bakers were Popish priests or
anyone in particular; and so on to the end of a very long chapter.
Certainly the personages described in this burlesque had to be
obscurely drawn in order to protect the author from the dungeon or
the stake. In one place Rabelais intimates that he did not mean
anything at all by his absurdities. “When I did dictate them I thought
thereon no more than you who possibly were drinking the whilst I
was. For in the composing of this very lordly book I never lost nor
bestowed any more nor any other time than what was appointed to
serve me for taking my bodily refection, that is, whilst I was eating
and drinking.” And indeed “Gargantua” is a work that, like the verses
of Ennius to which he alludes, smells much more of the wine than
the oil; for, with all its drollery, and occasional wisdom, there are
chapters which seem little less than the products of inebriety.
Moreover, the work is defaced, especially the earlier part of it, by a

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The Historical and Philosophical

Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth

Kant and the Science of Logic: A Historical and

Pluralisms in Truth and Logic 1st ed. Edition Jeremy

Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Peace and War: Historical, Philosophical, and

Introduction to 80×86 Assembly Language and Computer

Music, Leisure, Education: Historical and Philosophical

Frege on Language, Logic, and Psychology Eva Picardi

EXPLORING GREGORY OF NYSSA : philosophical,

The Historical and

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-5994 ISSN 2634-6001 (electronic)

Cover illustration: ilbusca / Getty Images

to extend to the present, the aim is to encourage engagement with con-

itself or the philosophical traditions in which debate about them played

Berlin, Germany Michael Beaney

1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer

Part I The Book and Its Context 39

2 Language, Truth and Logic and the Anglophone

3 ‘Viennese Bombshells’: Reactions to Language, Truth

Part II Philosophy of Language in LTL 99

5 Linguistic Analysis: Ayer and Early Ordinary

Part III Philosophy of Mind and Psychology 151

6 The Evolution of Ayer’s Views on the Mind-Body Relation153

7 A Logical Positivist’s Progress: A Puzzle About Other

Part IV Epistemology and Truth 249

8 Ayer’s Verificationism: Dead as a Dodo?251

9 Definition Versus Criterion: Ayer on the Problem

Part V Ethics and Values 305

10 Ayer and Berkeley on the Meaning of Ethical and

11 Ayer’s Book of Errors and the Crises of Contemporary

Gergely Ambrus is an assistant professor at the Eötvös Loránd

László Kocsis is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy,

of the modalities. He edited numerous volumes at Bloomsbury,

© The Author(s) 2021 1

Ben Rogers (1999, 104) identified Nagel’s reported warlord as Alfred

1.2 The Way to Language, Truth and Logic

especially Wittgenstein were then prevalent.3 Nonetheless, Ayer’s Christ

Schlick lectured mainly about the laws of nature, conventions, space-­

1.2.2 The Genesis of LTL

philosophical paper appeared in The New Oxford Outlook (a magazine for

It is true of every empirical hypothesis that we can continue to accept it, in

While “Atomic Propositions” did not explicitly refer to the Vienna

The sort of supra-mundane, transcendent metaphysics which was the

1.3 The Book of a Young Philosopher

1.3.1 The Content of LTL and Its Main Theses

Ayer repeatedly claimed, perhaps to ward off criticism, or possibly because

noted that LTL “is almost wholly composed of preexisting material.”

distinction regarding the strength of verification; a proposition is strongly

Some of them attacked verification in general and Ayer’s version in

Those who use the English language have no difficulty, in practice, in

namely that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple

increased,” and if the reverse happens, “its probability has been

were misrepresented, which convinced a broad audience that the book

analyzed into basic sense-contents (LTL, 130). However, there may be a

tools of LTL to work, all problems of philosophy can be definitively

debates. In fact, an interesting parallel could be drawn here with

Determining the significance and influence of any given book is a

1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer

Part I The Book and Its Context 39

2 Language, Truth and Logic and the Anglophone

3 ‘Viennese Bombshells’: Reactions to Language, Truth

Part II Philosophy of Language in LTL 99

5 Linguistic Analysis: Ayer and Early Ordinary

Part III Philosophy of Mind and Psychology 151

6 The Evolution of Ayer’s Views on the Mind-Body Relation153

7 A Logical Positivist’s Progress: A Puzzle About Other

Part IV Epistemology and Truth 249

8 Ayer’s Verificationism: Dead as a Dodo?251

9 Definition Versus Criterion: Ayer on the Problem

Part V Ethics and Values 305

10 Ayer and Berkeley on the Meaning of Ethical and

11 Ayer’s Book of Errors and the Crises of Contemporary

1.2 The Way to Language, Truth and Logic

Schlick lectured mainly about the laws of nature, conventions, space-

1.2.2 The Genesis of LTL

1.3 The Book of a Young Philosopher

1.3.1 The Content of LTL and Its Main Theses

1.3.3 LTL and Its Representation of the Vienna Circle