A. C. Ewing


Alfred Cyril Ewing 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. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School.
From his entrance to University College, Oxford, Ewing's early academic career was, as Russell Grice remarks, one of "almost unparalleled brilliance". Firsts in Classical Moderations and, in 1920, 'Greats' were followed by a Bishop Fraser Scholarship at Oriel College in 1920 and a Senior Demyship at Magdalen College in 1921 He was awarded the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy the same year.
In 1923, Ewing was amongst the first Oxford students to be awarded a DPhil, his thesis being published as Kant's Treatment of Causality. He served as a lecturer at Oxford 1924 –1925, He was awarded the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy in 1926. An expanded version of the essay for which he won the same was published as The Morality of Punishment, with a short introduction by W. D. Ross.
After holding temporary positions at Michigan University and Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1927, he was appointed the same year, by A. E. Heath, as a lecturer in philosophy at University College, Swansea where he remained until 1931. There he would be reunited, as a colleague, with his former student at Oriel Richard Aaron, with whom he would remain a lifelong friend.
In 1931 he was appointed University Lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge. Ewing would later recall his "shock" on arriving at Cambridge to find "dominant not the influence of Moore, Broad, or Russell, but the influence of Wittgenstein" reporting that "the reaction his philosophy provoked in me was one of sharp antagonism".
He was awarded, the Cambridge D.Litt in 1933, at the remarkably early age of 34. The following year, Ewing published his extensive study Idealism: A Critical Survey, which was reviewed favourably by T. E. Jessop. It offers an early characterisation of a 'traditional account' of coherentist epistemic justification.
The late 1930s saw the publication of "Meaninglessness" and 'The Linguistic Theory' two "powerfully argued" papers that, Brand Blanshard contends, "must have contributed much to the disintegration of positivism".
He served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1941 to 1942, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1941. He delivered the latter's annual Henriette Hertz philosophical lecture the same year. During the Second World War, Goebel records, Ewing turned his attention back to ethics with the publication of a series of articles that formed the basis of two works both published in 1947:The Definition of Good and The Individual, the State, and World Government. In a 1945 article for The Hibbert Journal he argued there were, as Brian McGuinness puts it, "no retributive, reformatory, or deterrent grounds, for making the terms of peace for Germany as a whole more severe than they would otherwise need to be". Wittgenstein wrote to Rush Rhees that Ewing’s article was "stupidish and academical but not unkind. It treated the Germans as prospective inmates of a reformatory school, managed on modern, humane principles.... the Journal surprised me as being rather human."
Two visiting professorships took him to Princeton and Northwestern University in 1949. In the winter of 1950 Ewing attended the silver jubilee Indian Philosophical Congress in Calcutta and lectured at a number of Indian universities. He returned to India in 1959, to Mysore, to attend the joint symposium between the Indian Philosophical Congress and the International Institute of Philosophy, of which he was an active member.
At Cambridge where, as Ayer contends, Ewing was "not well treated", he was "eventually" made a reader in 1954. And, after many years of lecturing for the university, he was finally elected a fellow of Jesus College in 1962, Ayer thought that Ewing "was an able philosopher, a good scholar and a prolific writer" but one that "never caught the idiom... largely foisted on Cambridge in the 1930s by Ludwig Wittgenstein."
After holding a visiting position in Colorado in 1963, he retired from Cambridge in 1966 with an Honorary Fellowship from Jesus College. and moved to Manchester. But in 1967 he took a visiting position at San Francisco State College and in 1971 such a post at Delaware.
He continued to write, working to complete Value and Reality: the Philosophical Case for Theism which was published posthumously. This was a work, Grice records, Ewing "had started writing for twenty-five years before its publication", and one "that had been his central concern for the last five years of his life".
Ewing died of a stroke in Manchester, England, on 14 May 1973. He left his papers, and Goebel reports, his body, to the University of Manchester. His eyes went to Manchester Royal Eye Hospital and the rest to Manchester anatomy department. To "the Moral Science Library in Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, he left his picture of Kant."
Ayer recalls Ewing "as naive, unworldly even by academic standards, intellectually shrewd, unswervingly honest and a devout Christian." Ayer also recalls teasing Ewing with the question of what he was most looking forward to in the afterlife, His immediate response being that "God will tell me whether there are synthetic a priori propositions."
Blanshard paid tribute to Ewing in both a journal obituary,'' and within his own Library of Living Philosophers Festschrift.
Thomas Hurka notes that "Grice's fine obituary of him is poignant, describing a man whose work was not appreciated at its true worth because of a change in philosophical fashion—and the arrogance of those who made the change—and irrelevant facts about his personality" but "that as parts of moral philosophy return to views like Ewing's his contributions are becoming better known."

Philosophical work

Ewing was a defender of traditional metaphysics and developed what has been termed an "analytic idealism".
He was one of the foremost analysts of the concept "good", and a distinguished contributor to justificatory theorizing about punishment.
Ewing was critical of the verification theory of meaning. 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.
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.
Ewing distinguished between two forms of philosophical analysis. The first is "what the persons who make a certain statement usually intend to assert" and the second "the qualities, relations and species of continuants mentioned in the statement". As an illustration he takes the statement "I see a tree", this statement could be analysed in terms what the everyday person intends when they say this or it could be analysed metaphysically by asserting representationalism.

Works

Books

*More complete publication details can be found online in Bernd Goebel's entry on Ewing for the BBKL.''