What an interesting fellow

I took notice of A.J. "Freddie" Ayer twice during my college career, on both occasions because a close friend undertook an energetic denunciation, the point of which was, if I heard correctly, that one ought not to take Wittgenstein's Tractatus too literally.

Some things I hadn't know about Ayer:

• At age 77 he intervened to prevent Mike Tyson from raping Naomi Campbell.
• He liked the ladies, and they liked him back. He had four wives, and his biographers have so far accounted for a couple dozen lovers. One of them said "girls came and went, or came and stayed. Progressively I became a part of a trio, a quartet, a quintet and sextet (plus Renee). All the ladies knew about me, I knew all about them, but none of them knew about each other."
• He watched a lot of Buster Keaton.
• His first book was a hit. In the preface to a later edition he wrote "I understand this book has maintained high popularity, for reasons not wholly related to merit."
• He once choked almost to death - his heart was supposedly stopped for about four minutes. He recalled being comforted engaged in conversation by some kind of non-empirical being, manifesting itself as a red light. He commented that "my recent experiences, have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be."