- Lived:
- 1910–1989 · London, Vienna, Oxford — and every good party in between
- Tradition:
- Logical positivism, imported into English; analytic philosophy at its most swashbuckling
- The Big Idea:
- A sentence that could never, even in principle, be checked against experience isn't false — it's meaningless; philosophy's job is to sort sense from nonsense.
- In their words:
- "Nearly all of it was false" — his own verdict, forty years on, about the book that made him famous.
- If you remember one thing:
- At twenty-five he wrote a little black book that told metaphysicians, theologians, and moralists that they had been talking nonsense — and then spent fifty years honestly auditing whether he'd been talking nonsense too.