20th century · 1910–1989
Who influenced A. J. Ayer?
Influences
Language, Truth and Logic carried logical positivism to the English public.
A. J. Ayer was influenced by Rudolf Carnap. That is 1 line of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Unknown author, Public domain See the whole map
Who was A. J. Ayer?
A. J. Ayer made his name with Language, Truth and Logic (1936), a statement of logical positivism whose dismissal of metaphysics and support for emotivism in ethics caused much controversy. He had spent the winter of 1932–33 with Moritz Schlick and the Vienna Circle.
After serving with the Special Operations Executive and MI6 in the Second World War, he was Grote Professor at University College London and then Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford until 1978. He was president of the British Humanist Association and for a time of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, and was knighted in 1970.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced A. J. Ayer?
1 direct influence on this map, earliest first.
- Rudolf Carnap 1891–1970
The line of teachers behind A. J. Ayer
The longest documented line of influence ending at A. J. Ayer runs 27 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- T. H. Green
- F. H. Bradley
- Bertrand Russell
- Rudolf Carnap
- A. J. Ayer
Two steps away from A. J. Ayer
Indirect influences
- Through Rudolf Carnap: Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell
Contemporaries of A. J. Ayer
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of A. J. Ayer, with no direct line between them.
- Simone Weil 1909–1943
- J. L. Austin 1911–1960
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908–2009
- W. V. O. Quine 1908–2000
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908–1961
- Wilfrid Sellars 1912–1989
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
A. J. Ayer by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 1
- Direct followers
- 0
- Thinkers upstream
- 106
- Thinkers downstream
- 0
- Wikipedia languages
- 51 — #45 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Schools and lineages
Questions about A. J. Ayer
- Who influenced A. J. Ayer?
- Rudolf Carnap.
- Who did A. J. Ayer influence?
- No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on A. J. Ayer.
- When did A. J. Ayer live?
- 1910–1989. The map files A. J. Ayer under the 20th century.
- How rare is the A. J. Ayer card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on A. J. Ayer in 51 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016