Blog: My Bread

Many people are aware of the fact that logical posivitists' treatment of metaphysics was harsh, but they seem to underestimate how harsh that treatment was. I am rereading Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, and it's almost hilarious. Ayer treats metaphysics dryly like any good English man would. The view that the metaphysician is to be reckoned among the poets appears to rest on the assumption that both talk nonsense. But this assumption is false. In the vast majority of cases the sentences which are produced by poets do have literal meaning. The difference between the man who [...]