Michael Richard Ayers FBA (born 27 June 1935) is a British philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford.
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.
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.