Michael Richard Ayers, (born 1935) is a British people, British philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, St. John's College of the University of Cambridge, and was a member of Wadham College, Oxford from 1965 until 2002. Among his students are Colin McGinn and William Child.

Career

Ayers's research focuses are in the Philosophy#Historical overview, history of philosophy and in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, language. He is co-editor of the ''Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy'' and subject editor of the ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', has edited the work of George Berkeley and published on René Descartes, Descartes. His most influential contributions, however, concern the work of John Locke. He is the author of ''Locke: Epistemology and Ontology'' as well as of several seminal articles on John Locke#Ideas, Locke's philosophy. In 1987 Bryan Magee invited Michael Ayers to talk about Locke and Berkeley in the BBC, BBC's series ''The Great Philosophers''. More recently, Michael Ayers has published further work on metaphysics.

Publications

* ''Philosophy and its past'', Jonathan Rée, Michael Ayers, Adam Westoby: Harvester Press, 1978. * ''Philosophical works : including the works on vision'' George Berkeley 1685–1753. Michael Ayers (ed.) New ed., revised and enlarged. London : Dent, 1985. * ''Locke'' London : Routledge 1991 * 'The foundations of knowledge and the logic of substance: the structure of Locke's general philosophy' in ''Locke'' Vere Chappell (ed.), Oxford University Press 1998 * ''The Cambridge history of seventeenth-century philosophy'' Daniel Garber, Michael Ayers: Cambridge University Press 1998 * 'What is Realism?' in ''Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society'', Volume 75, Number 1, July 2001 * 'The Second Meditation and Objections to Cartesian Dualism' in Christia Mercer and Eileen O'Neill (eds.), ''Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics'', Oxford University Press, 2005 * 'Ordinary Objects, Ordinary Language and Identity' in The Monist, Vol. 88, No. 4, October 2005 *Ayers, Michael R. "Substance, Reality, and the Great Dead Philosophers." American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970): 38–49.
The paper is a reply to: * Ayers, Michael (2005). "Was Berkeley an empiricist or a rationalist?". The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. pp. 34–62. *''Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism'', Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019.

Awards

* FBA: Fellow of the British Academy * Member of Academia Europaea

External links

Fellows of Wadham CollegeRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Editorial Board

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ayers, Michael R. 1935 births 20th-century British male writers 20th-century British philosophers 20th-century essayists 20th-century English historians 21st-century British male writers 21st-century British philosophers 21st-century essayists 21st-century English historians Analytic philosophers Aristotelian philosophers British logicians British male essayists Descartes scholars Empiricists Epistemologists Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford George Berkeley scholars Historians of philosophy Living people Locke scholars Metaphysicians Metaphysics writers Ontologists Ordinary language philosophy People educated at Battersea Grammar School Philosophers of education Philosophers of history Philosophers of language Philosophers of logic Philosophers of mind Philosophy academics