A. C. Ewing

Alfred Cyril Ewing ( ; 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

Early life and education

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 (now the John Locke Prize) the same year.

In 1923, Ewing was amongst the first Oxford students to be awarded a DPhil, his (revised) thesis being published as Kant's Treatment of Causality (1924). 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 (1929), with a short introduction by W. D. Ross.

In 1931 he was appointed University Lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge.

He was awarded, the Cambridge D.Litt in 1933, It offers an early characterisation of a 'traditional account' of coherentist epistemic justification.

The late 1930s saw the publication of "Meaninglessness" two "powerfully argued" papers that, Brand Blanshard contends, "must have contributed much to the disintegration of positivism". 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 (an investigation primarily into problems of metaethics) and The Individual, the State, and World Government (a work on political ethics against the background of the European catastrophe and the danger of nuclear war). 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." 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. 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."

Retirement and death

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. 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."

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." Goebel (2014) and (2010) suggests that Ewing characterised his work as "eine Art analytischen Idealismus" (a kind of analytical idealism). This term of description is Goebel's however, not Ewing's, and it has not been widely adopted to describe the latter's work. Goebel in both instances points to two pieces of intellectual autobiography, in which Ewing describes his attempt to combine what he takes to be the important insights of his idealist teachers with the methods of the early Cambridge School of Analysis around G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad.

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.

Works

Books

Kant's Treatment of Causality. London: Kegan Paul, 1924.
The Morality of Punishment. with Suggestions for a General Theory of Ethics', London: Kegan Paul, 1929. reprinted with a new preface, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1970
Idealism: A Critical Survey. London: Methuen, 1934. (New edition, 1950.)
Reason and Intuition. London: Humphrey Milford, 1941.
The Individual, the State, and World Government. New YorK: Macmillan, 1947.
The Definition of Good. New York: Macmillan, 1947; London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1948.
The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. (New edition, London: Routledge, 1980.)
Ethics. London: English Universities Press, 1953. (New editions, New York: Free Press, 1965; London: Teach Yourself Books, 1975.)
(ed.) The Idealist Tradition: from Berkeley to Blanshard; edited, with an introduction and commentary. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957.
Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959. (New edition, 2012.)
Non-linguistic Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968.
Value and Reality: the Philosophical Case for Theism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973

Papers and book chapters

(1923) "Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories" Mind 32 (125): 50–66
(1925). "The Relation Between Knowing and its Object (I.)" Mind 34 (134): 137–153
(1925) "The Relation Between Knowing and Its Object (II.)" Mind 34 (135): 300–310.
(1927) "Punishment as a Moral Agency: An Attempt to Reconcile the Retributive and the Utilitarian View" Mind 36 (143): 292–305;
(1929) "The Idea of Cause" Journal of Philosophical Studies. 4 (16): 453–466
(1930) "Direct Knowledge and Perception". Mind 39 (154): 137–153.
(1931) "The Message of Kant". Journal of Philosophical Studies. 6 (21): 43–55
(1932) "A Defence of Causality". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 33: 95–128, reprinted in Kennick, W. E. (ed.) Metaphysics: Readings and Reappraisals (1966) pp. 258–275
(1933) "The Paradoxes of Kant's Ethics", Philosophy 13 (1938), 40-56
(1935) "Mechanical and Teleological Causation", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 14 , 67-82
(1935) "Two Kinds of Analysis", Analysis 22(4): 60–64.
(1937) Excerpted in Edwards, Paul & Arthur Pap (eds.) A Modern Introduction to Philosophy (1965) [1957], an abbreviated form of this article contributed by Ewing, along with a brief 1961 addendum, can be found in MacGregor, Geddes & Robb, J. Wesley (eds.) Readings in religious philosophy (1962).
(1937) "Some Points in the Philosophy of Locke" Philosophy, 12(45), 33–46.
(1938) "What is action?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 17
(1939) "A Suggested Non-Naturalistic Analysis of Good" Mind 48 (1939), 1-22, reprinted in Readings in Ethical Theory, ed. Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers (1952).
(1939) "Intuitionism and Utilitarianism", Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 1 (4): 649–665
(1939). "The Linguistic Theory of "A Priori" Propositions". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 40: 207–244. reprinted in: H.D. Lewis (ed.), Clarity is not enough. Essays in Criticism of Linguistic Philosophy, London 2/1969, 147-169 (abridged version)
(1940) "Ethics and Belief in God" Hibbert Journal 39: 4
(1943) "Punishment as Viewed by the Philosopher" The Canadian Bar Review, 21
(1944) "Subjectivism and Naturalism in Ethics" Mind, Vol. 53, No. 210, pp. 120–141, reprinted in: Sellars and Hospers (eds.), Readings in Ethical Theory, pp. 118–133 (1957)
(1945) "The Ethics of Punishing Germany", Hibbert Journal 43: 2, 99-106
(1947) "Kantianism" in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.) Twentieth Century Philosophy: Living Schools of Thought pp. 251–264
(1949) "Philosophical Ethics and the Ethics of Practical Life" in Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy 1:470–472
(1953)."Empiricism in Ethics". Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Philosophy 10 pp. 78–82
(1953) "The Necessity Of Metaphysics" in H. D. Lewis (ed.) Contemporary British Philosophy. Personal Statements. Third series.
(1954) "Kant's Attack on Metaphysics". Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 8 (30 (4)): 371–391
(1955) "Recent Tendencies in Moral Philosophy in Great Britain" Zeitschrift Für Philosophische Forschung, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 337–347.
(1957) "Recent Developments in British Ethical Thought," in C. A. Mace (ed.), British Moral Philosophy in the Mid-Century, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 63–95.
(1961) "The Autonomy of Ethics" in: Ian Ramsey (ed.), Prospect for Metaphysics. Essays of Metaphysical Exploration, pp. 33–49
(1967) "Conflicts of Duty", "Kant and Kantian Ethics", "Naturalistic Ethics" and other entries in: J. Macquarrie (ed.), The Dictionary of Christian Ethics
(1968) "The Concept of Democracy" in: World Perspectives in Philosophy, Religion, and Culture
(1968) "C.I. Lewis on the Relation Between the Good and the Right" in Schilpp, P. A. (ed.) The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 13). Open Court.
(1970) "Christian Ethics and Utilitarianism" in R. L. Cunningham (ed.), Situationism and The New Morality, New York, 152–167
(1970) "Are all a priori propositions and inferences analytic?" International Logic Review 1, 77–87
(1971) "The problem of universals" Philosophical Quarterly 21 , 207–216
(1971) "The Significance of Idealism for the Present Day" Idealistic Studies 1 (1971), 1–12
(1973) "Common Sense Propositions" Philosophy 48 , 363–379
(1975) "My Philosophical Attitude" in Philosophers on Their Own Work, vol. 1 (in a series published under the auspices of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.
(1980) "Blanshard's View of Good" in Schilpp, P. A. (ed.) The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 15).

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

Biography

Early life and education

Retirement and death

Works

Books

Papers and book chapters

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

External links