A. C. Ewing
Alfred Cyril Ewing by Walter Stoneman (1956)
Born
Alfred Cyril Ewing

(1899-05-11)11 May 1899
Leicester, England
Died14 May 1973(1973-05-14) (aged 74)
Manchester, England
Alma materUniversity of Oxford
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic idealism
Epistemic coherentism[1]
Main interests
Epistemology
Notable ideas
Contemporary formulation of the coherence theory of justification[1]

Alfred Cyril Ewing FBA (/ˈjuːɪŋ/; 11 May 1899 – 14 May 1973), was an English philosopher who spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge. He was a prolific writer who made contributions to Kant scholarship, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion.

Biography

Alfred Ewing was born in Leicester, England, on 11 May 1899, the only child of Emma and H. F. Ewing.[2][3] He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School.[2][3]

Ewing studied at Oxford, first at University College and then at Oriel College.[3] In 1920, he earned a first in "Greats. And, in 1923, he was amongst the first Oxford students to be awarded a DPhil,[4] his thesis being published as Kant’s Treatment of Causality (1924).[5] He was also awarded the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy in 1921 and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy in 1926.[6] A revised version of the essay for which he won the latter prize was published as The Morality of Punishment (1929).[2]

After holding temporary postions at Michigan University and Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he was a lecturer in philosophy at University College, Swansea until 1931 when he was appointed University Lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge.[3] He was awarded, the Cambridge D.Litt in 1933, at the early age of 34.[2][6] He served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1941 to 1942, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1941.[6] He would serve as visiting professor at Princeton, Northwestern, Southern California, Delaware, and San Francisco State College.[7]

At Cambridge, he was made a reader in 1954 and elected a fellow of Jesus College in 1962.[3] He retired in 1966 and moved to Manchester but continued to write, working to complete Value and Reality (1973) which was published just after his death.[5]

Ewing died in Manchester, England, on 14 May 1973.[3][7]

Recollections of Ewing

Ewing was an attendee of the Moral Sciences Club and was present at the infamous Wittgeinstein's poker incident.[8]

Wittgenstein jibed during a lecture on solipsism: "Let us make the purely hypothetical assumption that Ewing has a mind".[8]

Ewing was viewed negatively by some with Maurice Wiles stating "You felt you were back in school. It was very depressing. He always had a worked out answer to everything" and Professor Michael Wolff calling him a "drab little man".[8]

Georg Kreisel recollects that Ewing wore heavy boots around due to a fear of getting wet and described him as someone who looked like someone who still lived with his mother, which he did.[8]

Ewing was a deeply religious and serious person.[3]

A.J. Ayer describes "my friend Dr. Alfred Ewing" as "naive, un-worldly even by academic standards, intellectually shrewd, unswervingly honest."[9] Ayer also spoke of Ewing as "an able philosopher, a good scholar and a prolific writer"[10] and recounts that:

He was also religious. I teased him once by asking him what he most looked forward to in the next world. He replied without hesitation “God will tell me whether there are synthetic a priori propositions.’ It says something not only about Ewing’s character but also about the nature of the subject that this answer should be endearingly absurd.[10]

Philosophical work

Ewing believed that the study of the history of philosophy was important to philosophical practice, and paid particular attention to this in his studies of Kant.

He was a defender of traditional metaphysics (as opposed to post-modern ethics) and developed what has been termed an "analytic idealism".[11] He was a 20th-century pioneer in the philosophy of religion, one of the foremost analysts of the concept "good", and a distinguished contributor to justificatory theorizing about punishment.

Ewing wrote about meaning and was critical of the verification theory of meaning.[12] He held the view that probability was not a quality of a thing, preferring to understand it in relative terms. Any probability statement without implicit or explicit reference to the relevant data upon which probability is based was considered meaningless.[12]

Additionally he viewed self-contradictions to be meaningful. He said that although there is "a sense in which it seems reasonable to say that all self-contradictory sentences are meaningless" in that we cannot "combine" the meaningful constituents of self-contradictions in thought, there is also a sense in which they are meaningful. He therefore took issue with the thesis that "we cannot think the meaning of a self-contradictory statement as a whole, though we know the meaning of the separate words". A self-contradiction, according to Ewing, proposes that two ideas can be combined into one, which is a proposition. If self-contradictions were meaningless and a "mere set of words" then we would not be able to investigate or say if they were wrong, and it is this proposition that they can be combined which makes a self-contradictory utterance meaningful.[12]

Works

Books

Papers/book chapters

Notes

  1. 1 2 Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  2. 1 2 3 4 Grice, G. R., (1973) "Alfred Cyril Ewing, 1899–1973" Proceedings of the British Academy 59, 1973, 499-513
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Mander, W. J. (2006), "Ewing, Alfred Cyril", The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, Continuum, doi:10.1093/acref/9780199754694.001.0001/acref-9780199754694-e-687, retrieved 28 December 2023
  4. ↑ "A celebration of the DPhil Centenary 1919 – 2019"
  5. 1 2 Hurka, Thomas (6 November 2014), "Introduction: British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing", British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing, Oxford University Press, pp. 20–21, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199233625.003.0001, retrieved 29 December 2023
  6. 1 2 3 "Ewing, Alfred Cyril, (1899–14 May 1973), retired as Reader in Philosophy, University of Cambridge (1954–66); Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge, 1962 (Hon. Fellow, 1966)". WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u154318. Retrieved 28 December 2023.
  7. 1 2 Blanshard, Brand (1974). "Alfred Cyril Ewing 1899-1973". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 48: 171–172. ISSN 0065-972X.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Edmonds, David; Eidinow, John (2001). Wittgenstein's poker : the story of a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers. Internet Archive. New York : Ecco. pp. 67–68. ISBN 978-0-06-621244-9.
  9. ↑ Ayer, A. J. (1992). "Still More Of My Life". In Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.). The philosophy of A.J. Ayer. La Salle, Ill. : Open Court. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-8126-9172-6 – via Internet Archive.
  10. 1 2 Ayer, A. J. (Alfred Jules) (1985). More of my life. Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-19-281878-2 – via Internet Archive.
  11. ↑ Beaney, Michael, ed. (2013). The Oxford handbook of the history of analytic philosophy. Internet Archive. Oxford : Oxford University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-19-923884-2.
  12. 1 2 3 Ewing, A. C. (1937). "Meaninglessness". Mind. 46 (183): 347–364. ISSN 0026-4423.
  13. ↑ Broad, C. D. (1930). "Review of The Morality of Punishment" (PDF). Mind. 39 (155): 347–353. ISSN 0026-4423. JSTOR 2250204.
  14. ↑ Pleydell-Pearce, A. G. (January 1972). "Non-Linguistic Philosophy , by A. C. Ewing". Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. 3 (1): 87–89. doi:10.1080/00071773.1972.11006235. ISSN 0007-1773. This book comprises fourteen essays, on a number of different subjects, written by Dr. Ewing over a period of some thirty years. Such unity as it displays comes primarily from the fact that all of the essays exemplify the 'liberalism' that characterizes Dr. Ewing's philosophical views. A sustained attack on the verification principle, an attack to which the author returns a number of times in the book, helps to bring together articles on otherwise very different topics. These essays show Dr. Ewing also as consistently resistant to the philosophically fashionable. whether it be pre-war positivism or the later linguistic analytical approach of contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Although, on the evidence of this book, he appears more antagonistic to the former than to the latter.
  15. ↑ Knox, John (1975). "A. C. Ewing: A Critical Survey of Ewing's Recent Work". Religious Studies. 11 (2): 229–255. ISSN 0034-4125.
  16. ↑ McPherson, Thomas (1975). "Reviewed Work: Value and Reality, The Philosophical Case for Theism. by A. C. Ewing". Mind. 84 (336): 625–628. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXXIV.1.625. JSTOR 2253651.
  17. ↑ Tooley, Michael (1976). "Reviewed Work: Value and Reality: The Philosophical Case for Theism by A. C. Ewing". The Philosophical Review. 85 (1): 115–121. doi:10.2307/2184265. JSTOR 2184265.

References

Further reading

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