A. J. Ayer | Interview | Philosopher | Philosophy | Good Afternoon | 1977
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 มิ.ย. 2024
- Elaine Grande speaks to English philosopher Professor Sir. A. J. Ayer.
First shown: 22/06/1977
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Quote: VT17136
Or Freddie! I’ve only just learnt about Ayer but I love him already
A.J.Ayer was a brilliant man who transformed Philosophy during the postwar period.
He was objective enough to denounce the use of the verification principle used by the Positivist and the logical Atomist as a method to accept or reject Empirical Facts.
Much better television in those days.
Better scholars - and more sensitive public.
He's very good and I like how he fights against the getting drowned and then comes up spewing, "Classicists! Just look at what the classicists are doing!"
Healthy
Slow down and take your time to enunciate Mr Ayer. Jabber jabber waffle waffle.
Oh dear! You can't keep up with Freddy's cut-glass, Bloomsbury Square, Gordon Square, UCL (my alma mater), Oxford-London accent and speed of diction? That's your problem, my friend.
If a love or anecdotes and discursiveness, plus having written LTaL is "jabber jabber" to you, perhaps you would prefer the Whitehouse press releases, as patent totems of veracity?
Speaking for myself, I love it!
Indeed Alfred Jules was both admired and notorious for his bonhomie and seductiveness to intellectual women.
A man who loved women and loved their company so greatly and was admired by women, has a great deal to commend his character and morals. Women do not tolerate wafflers, if they have a choice.
The constant friendship of several clever even brilliant women is the highest test and endorsement of a man's quality.
I should be more than content if some not unsympathetic wit wrote my epitaph upon a rugged monument, perhaps a broken column in a distant antique land, in these words:
"She was loved by many women, and, by force of her rhetoric and polished conversational seductiveness, persuaded many delightedly to remove their knickers even before her requesting such. Whence consummate analytical delight and consuming passion comingled most philosophically!"
What a character and public intellectual! More in the French or Italian vein than the run-of-the-mill English academic, even at UCL.
Regards, andrea
@@andreapandypetrapan You're being biased; the original commentator here has a point about the importance of articulation. Speaking very quickly and missing certain sounds in speech undermines the whole point of communicating. If one has trouble understanding you because you don't enunciate your words according to the rules of grammar, it's not the other person's fault; you've put the cart ahead of the horse.
I'm a big fan of Freddie Ayer and was greatly influenced by him before I went my own way and became the first intellectual in over 100 generations to solve, definitively, the greatest philosophical problem. (If you don't believe me, simply look up The Definitive Answer to the Meaning of life [2023], by Jack Abaza. In philosophy, strange possibilities are allowed, such as when your expectation of an intellectual god is betrayed by a most unexpected appearance, on a TH-cam post's comment section. But, hey, I was never one to follow the norm!) And even with my achievement, I still take the time to make sure my ideas don't get misunderstood. Flowery or hifalutin language is fine under humorous contexts, but it's unaccepted in a realm that professes to be transparent, free of bias, and in search of the truth.
Ayer's redeeming quality was that he wrote clearly and challenged the "unchallengeable" pillars of dogma, which people associated with "too obviously true to be questioned." Hence, this was how he got the nickname "The Wickedest Man in Oxford." But, occasionally, philosophers grow overconfident and begin to falter in the style that made them valuable to society, and it's on these occasions that they need a reminder, a reminder to enunciate words and ideas clearly.
Vain and narcissistic, it seems.