identity of what makes a person now the same person as some person in some previous year, maybe a boy or a girl. It is no easy question, and he advances it. There is also consideration of Descartes' cogito ergo sum, and the family of theories, later to become an orthodoxy for a time, that conscious or mental events are in fact only physical events.
Ayer wrote more than many distinguished and great philosophers, even putting aside his books that are not philosophy strictly speaking. The volumes now before you contain almost all of his philosophical books. So far what has been provided in this introduction is a sketch of main parts of three of them not so swift as to exclude a bit of philosophical reflection. These three together with one more are perhaps his finest books, despite the general excellence of all those still to be noticed. Unfortunately in this hurrying world, we must now proceed in a less leisurely fashion. What is truth or to turn that question into one clearer one, what is it for a proposition or statement to be true? The most familiar answer blessed by dictionaries, is that a true statement is one that corresponds to a fact in the world. But what is such a fact? Is the fact that the croquet lawn is green as much in the world or of the world as the lawn itself, and maybe the greenness of the grass? You may wonder if the fact that the croquet lawn is green, like the lawn and the greenness, actually has a location. You may then come to wonder if a fact is itself a true statement. Do you now take up the idea that it is things and properties that true statements correspond to? If that is a very good idea, to my mind, what is the relation? Such difficulties are contemplated by Ayer in one of the papers collected in the book The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963). He also considers a quite different philosophical idea about truth. What is the answer to the question however it is related to the one above, of what it is that we understand and state in stating that a statement is true? In saying a statement is true some say, what we do is just make that very statement. Nothing more is stated by the statement that the lawn is green is true than the lawn is green. The idea is coolly and well examined by him on the way to a related but different position. Of several essays in the book directed at the thinking of other philosophers the best known one for good reason has to do with Ludwig Wittgenstein's declaration about the possibility of a private as against a public language say a private language in which you use a term you think up in order to refer to a private sensation. There can be no such language, according to Wittgenstein essentially because any utterance in a language depends on the use of signs such that there are independent tests for the signs being used correctly. As it seems to me and others, Ayer's direct responses silence or should silence this piece of philosophical audacity almost as wonderfully unlikely as Wittgenstein's declaration that there is no process in the brain associated with thinking. In The Origins of Pragmatism, made up of two large studies of the American philosophers Charles Peirce and William James, Ayer attends to subjects of theirs which were also his. Certainly there were similarities as well as differences between Logical Positivism and Pragmatism firstly in terms of the importance given to the verification of utterances. Peirce's developed doctrine of signs or representations including their classification was of clear interest to Ayer and he clarifies it to persist for a moment with the matter of truth and hence with differences rather than similarities, there was James's pragmatic theory of it to consider. In it he says that what is true is often whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief. Here he seems not far enough from the ideas that what is true is what works or gives us satisfaction or satisfies us emotionally. This is evidently not Peirce's idea whatever is to be said of it that the true opinion in any matter is the one fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate the matter.
Ayer as you may expect does not tolerate James's way with truth. Still he works hard to find a somehow related theory that is more arguable. Here and elsewhere he engages splendidly and to our great benefit not in philosophical scholarship but in what can be called philosophical rectification and reconstruction making a critical entry into another philosopher's thinking and then making the best of it finding the best version before coming to alternative thinking or a judgement. There is less need for this sort of thing he evidently supposes, with Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore the two great stalwarts of Cambridge philosophy Cambridge philosophy at its best without visions and intimations, either technical and abstract or literary and loose. His accounts of their philosophy in Russell and Moore the Analytical Heritage (1971) are without parallel as wonderful expositions by a philosopher both in intimate connection with a subject-matter and capable both of adding to it and maintaining his independence.
Russell shared with a multitude of philosophers the conviction surely indubitable, that the meanings of at least many terms say names and descriptions, somehow or other are things for which they stand things to which they refer. Or better the meanings of these terms are somehow bound up with these things dependent on them. Is this not truistic with Alfred Jules Ayer? Is it not true of the present Queen of England? That is all very well but what of the terms the present king of France and the fountain of youth in from or if you share the beliefs of 51% of the population of Britain on this day in 2004, the honest prime minister of Britain today? These are terms such that there is nothing, or many think there is nothing for which they stand they lack referents or reference. Russell's theory of descriptions, a formalized kind of culmination of much of the philosophy of British empiricism, explains how such terms can be meaningful as plainly they are despite their having no single referents. The very short story is that all such terms certainly including the ones that do have referents in the ordinary way, owe their meaning to the fact that statements including them rightly understood have a certain form and nature. The present king of France is wise is properly understood and analysed as There is something which alone rules over France and which is wise. In the analysis you will note the description that causes trouble for a referential theory of meaning is missing. Also referents do exist with respect to those terms in the analysis whose meaningfulness arguably depends on the existence of things.
Ayer's introduction to Russell moves quickly to the theory of descriptions and then beyond it. In the case of Moore who so impressed Russell when they were undergraduates together Ayer's perfect exposition begins with Moore's refutation in its several parts, of the idealistic thrust of most speculative metaphysics, that all of the universe with everything in it is somehow spiritual. This called up Moore's defence of common sense and in particular a belief in ordinary material objects. The best-known but not the most formidable part of his proof of the existence of material objects consists in the following lines in a lecture. I can prove now for instance that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands and saying as I make a certain gesture with the right hand Here is one hand and adding as I make a certain gesture with the left and here is another. 4 Ayer's discussion of this and of the rest of Moore is ideal in the main rather than the philosophical sense of the word. In 1972, he published Probability and Evidence. It begins with Hume in this case with the problem that arises from the fact that most of the inferences on which we depend in our lives are not strictly deductive ones. Their premises do not entail their conclusions to accept the premises but deny the conclusions is not to fall into self contradiction. Rather they are inductive inferences say that the staircase will continue to
ลักษณะเฉพาะของสิ่งที่ทำให้คนนี้คนเดียวเป็นคนบางในบางปี บางทีเด็กผู้ชาย หรือผู้หญิง มันเป็นคำถามที่ไม่ง่าย และเขาล่วงหน้า มีพิจารณาของ Descartes cogito ergo ผล และครอบครัวของทฤษฎี จะเป็น orthodoxy เป็นเวลา เหตุการณ์สติ หรือจิตใจในความเป็นจริงเพียงจริงเหตุการณ์Ayer wrote more than many distinguished and great philosophers, even putting aside his books that are not philosophy strictly speaking. The volumes now before you contain almost all of his philosophical books. So far what has been provided in this introduction is a sketch of main parts of three of them not so swift as to exclude a bit of philosophical reflection. These three together with one more are perhaps his finest books, despite the general excellence of all those still to be noticed. Unfortunately in this hurrying world, we must now proceed in a less leisurely fashion. What is truth or to turn that question into one clearer one, what is it for a proposition or statement to be true? The most familiar answer blessed by dictionaries, is that a true statement is one that corresponds to a fact in the world. But what is such a fact? Is the fact that the croquet lawn is green as much in the world or of the world as the lawn itself, and maybe the greenness of the grass? You may wonder if the fact that the croquet lawn is green, like the lawn and the greenness, actually has a location. You may then come to wonder if a fact is itself a true statement. Do you now take up the idea that it is things and properties that true statements correspond to? If that is a very good idea, to my mind, what is the relation? Such difficulties are contemplated by Ayer in one of the papers collected in the book The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963). He also considers a quite different philosophical idea about truth. What is the answer to the question however it is related to the one above, of what it is that we understand and state in stating that a statement is true? In saying a statement is true some say, what we do is just make that very statement. Nothing more is stated by the statement that the lawn is green is true than the lawn is green. The idea is coolly and well examined by him on the way to a related but different position. Of several essays in the book directed at the thinking of other philosophers the best known one for good reason has to do with Ludwig Wittgenstein's declaration about the possibility of a private as against a public language say a private language in which you use a term you think up in order to refer to a private sensation. There can be no such language, according to Wittgenstein essentially because any utterance in a language depends on the use of signs such that there are independent tests for the signs being used correctly. As it seems to me and others, Ayer's direct responses silence or should silence this piece of philosophical audacity almost as wonderfully unlikely as Wittgenstein's declaration that there is no process in the brain associated with thinking. In The Origins of Pragmatism, made up of two large studies of the American philosophers Charles Peirce and William James, Ayer attends to subjects of theirs which were also his. Certainly there were similarities as well as differences between Logical Positivism and Pragmatism firstly in terms of the importance given to the verification of utterances. Peirce's developed doctrine of signs or representations including their classification was of clear interest to Ayer and he clarifies it to persist for a moment with the matter of truth and hence with differences rather than similarities, there was James's pragmatic theory of it to consider. In it he says that what is true is often whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief. Here he seems not far enough from the ideas that what is true is what works or gives us satisfaction or satisfies us emotionally. This is evidently not Peirce's idea whatever is to be said of it that the true opinion in any matter is the one fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate the matter. Ayer as you may expect does not tolerate James's way with truth. Still he works hard to find a somehow related theory that is more arguable. Here and elsewhere he engages splendidly and to our great benefit not in philosophical scholarship but in what can be called philosophical rectification and reconstruction making a critical entry into another philosopher's thinking and then making the best of it finding the best version before coming to alternative thinking or a judgement. There is less need for this sort of thing he evidently supposes, with Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore the two great stalwarts of Cambridge philosophy Cambridge philosophy at its best without visions and intimations, either technical and abstract or literary and loose. His accounts of their philosophy in Russell and Moore the Analytical Heritage (1971) are without parallel as wonderful expositions by a philosopher both in intimate connection with a subject-matter and capable both of adding to it and maintaining his independence. Russell shared with a multitude of philosophers the conviction surely indubitable, that the meanings of at least many terms say names and descriptions, somehow or other are things for which they stand things to which they refer. Or better the meanings of these terms are somehow bound up with these things dependent on them. Is this not truistic with Alfred Jules Ayer? Is it not true of the present Queen of England? That is all very well but what of the terms the present king of France and the fountain of youth in from or if you share the beliefs of 51% of the population of Britain on this day in 2004, the honest prime minister of Britain today? These are terms such that there is nothing, or many think there is nothing for which they stand they lack referents or reference. Russell's theory of descriptions, a formalized kind of culmination of much of the philosophy of British empiricism, explains how such terms can be meaningful as plainly they are despite their having no single referents. The very short story is that all such terms certainly including the ones that do have referents in the ordinary way, owe their meaning to the fact that statements including them rightly understood have a certain form and nature. The present king of France is wise is properly understood and analysed as There is something which alone rules over France and which is wise. In the analysis you will note the description that causes trouble for a referential theory of meaning is missing. Also referents do exist with respect to those terms in the analysis whose meaningfulness arguably depends on the existence of things. Ayer's introduction to Russell moves quickly to the theory of descriptions and then beyond it. In the case of Moore who so impressed Russell when they were undergraduates together Ayer's perfect exposition begins with Moore's refutation in its several parts, of the idealistic thrust of most speculative metaphysics, that all of the universe with everything in it is somehow spiritual. This called up Moore's defence of common sense and in particular a belief in ordinary material objects. The best-known but not the most formidable part of his proof of the existence of material objects consists in the following lines in a lecture. I can prove now for instance that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands and saying as I make a certain gesture with the right hand Here is one hand and adding as I make a certain gesture with the left and here is another. 4 Ayer's discussion of this and of the rest of Moore is ideal in the main rather than the philosophical sense of the word. In 1972, he published Probability and Evidence. It begins with Hume in this case with the problem that arises from the fact that most of the inferences on which we depend in our lives are not strictly deductive ones. Their premises do not entail their conclusions to accept the premises but deny the conclusions is not to fall into self contradiction. Rather they are inductive inferences say that the staircase will continue to
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