  Alfred Jules Ayer was born in London on October 29, 1910. His mother, Reine, was descended from Dutch Jews, whilst his father, Jules Louis Cypress Ayer, came from a Swiss Calvinist background. As recounted in Rogers 1999, Ayer was a precocious but mischievous child, and so was sent to boarding school (outside Eastbourne) at the age of seven, from which he won a scholarship to Eton in 1923. There he impressed his peers with his intelligence and competitiveness, the latter trait manifesting itself in the way he played games. Ayer nevertheless felt an ‘outsider’, and it is clear that his fellow-students did not warm to him, perhaps due to the excessive zeal with which he attempted to convert them to atheism.  Feeling ‘an outsider’ was something that remained with him all his life. At the age of sixteen he specialized in classics and at the same time started reading some philosophy. Bertrand Russell’s Sceptical Essays made an impression, particularly Russell’s argument for the claim that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground for believing its truth.  Ayer said that this remained a motto for him throughout his philosophical career (see Rogers 1999, 45). At the same time a reading of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica also had a lasting effect, particularly Moore’s articulation of the Naturalistic Fallacy.