A.J.Ayer: A Life Book

If AJ Ayer, Britain's leading exponent of logical positivism in the 20th century, believed that the good life was none of philosophy's business, then this biography shows he thought it was certainly his business. As a young man in the 1930s discussing the nature of philosophy, Ayer told Isaiah Berlin that it was just about conceptual analysis and the rest, "all of life", was outside its remit. His Language, Truth and Logic was published at this time and Ayer duly spent the rest of his life trying to seal the fate of metaphysics, while living "all of life" to the full--you quickly lose count of his love affairs. He was a man who loved football, clubs, dancing and good food. The combination of his stern analytical philosophy and his aestheticism, and that aestheticism's contradictions (its mix of 1920s dandyism and 1930s rebelliousness), make Ayer's life intriguing. Ben Rogers' biography is full of anecdotes--when asked by a student about Albert Camus he replied "we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war"; and 40 years on he encountered Mike Tyson apparently assaulting Naomi Campbell and demanded that he and Tyson talk like rational men and settle the situation. You can read such stories not as an unfolding narrative culminating in the definitive Ayer, but like David Hume and Walter Pater, Ayer's philosophic and hedonistic heroes, treat them as a mere "bundle of perceptions" of a man, discrete experiences in the life of Ayer. Of course if you do, you are less likely to condemn him for the vices that seemed to necessarily accompany his joie de vivre--his selfishness and arrogance--and rather think of him simply as a man living for the day. Yet he hankered after a place in history alongside the great philosophers, and here there is a body of work to assess and an overall judgement to be made. Rogers' biography largely puts such assessment to one side, but then that analysis is for philosophy, and biography is about life, it might be said. The beauty of this particular biography, the irony of it being Ayer's, is that you are forced to question that dichotomy--philosophy and life--on every page, as Ayer seeks to solve another philosophic problem, and then heads to the club or restaurant, to a liaison with another girlfriend, for seven decades of logic and pleasure. --Jeff PettsRead More