Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer Quotes
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
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It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.
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Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
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Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
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I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
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I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.
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No moral system can rest solely on authority.
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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.
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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
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We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
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But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
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If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.
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I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
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The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.
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The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.
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The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs.
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If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
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There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.