Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Who has time these days to read the philosophers? Busy bloggers would benefit from a little Hume, Nietzsche and Sartre, of course, but with so many sites to visit and so little time...,well, you know how it is. We should, therefore, be grateful to Glyn Hughes and his "Squashed Philosophers" project where the great works are: ?Meticulously condensed to retain the style, substance, format, arguments and ideas of the originals, while ditching the bulk of the verbiage?.

A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth + Logic is particulary good. It was Ayer who said: ?The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else.? Last year, Grove Press published A.J. Ayer: A Life by Ben Rogers, which contains this marvellous anecdote from 1987, two years before Ayer died:

"At yet another party he had befriended Sanchez [Fernando Sanchez, a fashionable designer famous for women's underclothes]. Ayer was now standing near the entrance to the great white living-room of Sanchez's West 57th Street apartment, chatting to a group of young models and designers, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: 'Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.' Ayer stood his ground. 'And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.' Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campbell slipped out."

Ayer was 77 when he went up against Tyson. Logical positivism won the round.