Michael Ayres

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, and epistemology, where his realist empiricism is based on direct realism in perception, anti-conceptualism, and anti-scepticism. His book Knowing and Seeing (OUP 2019), in which he gives a detailed account of his epistemology, was discussed in a book symposium in Grazer Philosophische Studien (2021).