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British philosopher (born 1935) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael Richard Ayers FBA (born 27 June 1935) is a British philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford.[1] He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and was a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1965 until 2002. Among his students are Colin McGinn and William Child.
Ayers's research focuses are in the history of philosophy and in epistemology, metaphysics, and 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 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 Locke's philosophy.
In 1987 Bryan Magee invited Michael Ayers to talk about Locke and Berkeley in the BBC's series The Great Philosophers.
Michael Ayers has been publishing on metaphysics, where he defends an ordinary objects view and natural kinds realism,[2] and epistemology, where his realist empiricism is based on direct realism in perception, anti-conceptualism, and anti-scepticism.[3] His book Knowing and Seeing[4] (OUP 2019), in which he gives a detailed account of his epistemology, was discussed in a book symposium in Grazer Philosophische Studien[5] (2021).
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