Joseph Bentley

A.J Ayer occupies an unusual and unique position in the history of twentieth century philosophy. He remains both famous and infamous. In England particularly, few philosophers are as well known outside academia; perhaps only Russell and Wittgenstein are more familiar to the general public than Ayer. And yet within philosophy, his work and legacy attract nothing like the respect or reverence of those peers. Ayer is well known amongst philosophers, but not so well thought of. Language, Truth and Logic, the book that made his name and defines his legacy, is extraordinarily well known, easily available, and still features on many undergraduate syllabi, but is remembered primarily as a thrillingly brash failure. And as controversial as the content of LTL is its frequent use as the English language bible of Logical Empiricism (at least to scholars of the Vienna Circle).

This text provides an extensive exploration of the relationship between the thought of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, providing a new argument for the complementarity of their mature philosophies as part of a collaborative metatheory of science. In arguing that both Neurath and Carnap must be interpreted as proponents of epistemological naturalism, and that their naturalisms rest on shared philosophical ground, it is also demonstrated that the boundaries and possibilities for epistemological naturalism are not as restrictive as Quinean orthodoxy has previously suggested. Both building on and challenging the scholarship of the past four decades, this naturalist reading of Carnap also provides a new interpretation of Carnap’s conception of analyticity, allowing for a refutation of the Quinean argument for the incompatibility of naturalism and the analytic/synthetic distinction. In doing so, the relevance and potential importance of their scientific meta-theory for contemporary questions in the philosophy of science is demonstrated. This text appeals to students and researchers working on Logical Empiricism, Quine, the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science, as well as proponents of naturalized epistemology.