Originally posted by PinkFloyd
See what I get for believing Fox News? For weeks now, they've been reporting that Obama is a friend and confidant of "known terrorist" A J Ayer, and that Ayer bombed the Pentagon. Now, it DID cross my mind that such a person should be in jail, right? But NO!! Now I find out from Olbermann, a REAL journalist, that Ayer was never convicted of bombing anything.
{sigh} I should never watch Fox News.
I did some more research for you... there is a AJ Ayer
A.J. Ayer (1910-1989) was only 24 when he wrote the book that made his philosophical name, Language, Truth, and Logic (hereafter LTL), published in 1936. In it he put forward what were understood to be the major theses of Logical Positivism, and so established himself as that movement's leading English representative. In endorsing these views Ayer saw himself as continuing in the line of British empiricism established by Locke and Hume, an empiricism whose most recent representative was Russell. Throughout his subsequent career he remained true to this tradition's rejection of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, and so he saw the method of philosophy to be the analysis of the meaning of key terms, such as ‘causality’, ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘freedom’, and so on. The major portion of his work was devoted to exploring different facets of our claims to knowledge, particularly perceptual knowledge and knowledge that depended on inductive inference for its credence. Along the way he defended a ‘justified true belief’ account of knowledge, a Humean account of causation, and compatibilism with respect to freedom. In LTL he put forward an emotivist theory of ethics, one that he never abandoned. Ayer always wrote with stylish crispness and clarity; he could lay bare the bones of a philosophical difficulty in a few paragraphs of strikingly simple prose. On many a philosophical problem Ayer cannot be bettered for providing a lucid, informative, and revealing description of its contours. Above all, on reading an essay of his, whether it be on basic propositions, sense data, induction, or freedom, one comes away recognizing that the aim of the author has been to reach the truth, no matter what that turned out to be. Unfortunately, he sometimes rushed to reach it, which, together with the directness of his style, gave him a reputation for cleverness that he never lived down. Nevertheless, amongst British philosophers of the 20th Century he has been ranked as second only to Russell (by John Foster, in A.J. Ayer); Peter Strawson
I don't think he belonged to the Weathermen though