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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.

A.J. Ayer

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A.J. Ayer
Philosophy
Fairly
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Abstract
Scientific
Concepts
Criticism
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Usefully
Concerned
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More quotes by A.J. Ayer

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It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had endangered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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No moral system can rest solely on authority.
A.J. Ayer
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I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
A.J. Ayer