Alfred Jules Ayer Quotes

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought?

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

Being is the great explainer.

He could dismiss several schools of philosophy by shifting slightly in his chair or toting his whisky glass.

Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and what you decide is valuable.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more "organized and results-driven" than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

Metaphysics is a science.

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.