I really like Language, Truth and Logic, by A.J. Ayer. It’s an old book (1936) and it’s silly in some ways. It’s basically an early pro-empiricism manifesto, and I think many of its arguments are oversimplified, overconfident, or wrong. Even so, it does a great job of teaching some core mental motions of analytic philosophy. And its motivating intuitions feel familiar—I suspect that if 25-year-old Ayer got transported to the present, given internet access etc., we would see him on LessWrong pretty quick.
I really like Language, Truth and Logic, by A.J. Ayer. It’s an old book (1936) and it’s silly in some ways. It’s basically an early pro-empiricism manifesto, and I think many of its arguments are oversimplified, overconfident, or wrong. Even so, it does a great job of teaching some core mental motions of analytic philosophy. And its motivating intuitions feel familiar—I suspect that if 25-year-old Ayer got transported to the present, given internet access etc., we would see him on LessWrong pretty quick.