A. C. Ewing

Brand Blanshard
Born Alfred Cyril Ewing
(1899-05-11)May 11, 1899
Leicester
Died May 14, 1973(1973-05-14) (aged 74)
Manchester
Alma mater Oxford University
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic idealism
Epistemic coherentism[1]
Main interests
 Epistemology
Notable ideas
 Contemporary formulation of the coherence theory of justification[1]

Alfred Cyril Ewing (/ˈjuːɪŋ/; 11 May 1899 – 14 May 1973), usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was a British philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism.[2]

Biography

Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics. He was responsible for Karl Popper's invitation to Cambridge.

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".[3] 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.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1941 to 1942, and he was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1941.

Books

  • Value and Reality: The Philosophical Case for Theism (George Allen & Unwin, London 1973)
  • Non-linguistic Philosophy (George Allen & Unwin, London 1968)
  • Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy (London 1959)
  • The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to Blanshard (editor, London 1957)
  • Ethics (London 1953, ten reimpressions)
  • The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (Routledge, London 1951)
  • The Definition of Good (Routledge, London 1947)
  • The Individual, the State, and World Government (Macmillan, New York 1947)
  • Reason and Intuition (London 1941)
  • A Short Commentary on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (London 1938)
  • Idealism: A Critical Survey (New York 1936)
  • The Morality of Punishment (London 1929)
  • Kant's Treatment of Causality (London 1924)

Notes

  1. 1 2 Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  2. ↑ Edmonds and Eidinow 2001, p. 67.
  3. ↑ Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 5. n. 6.

References

  • Bernd Goebel (2010). "A. C. Ewing". In Bautz, Traugott. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German). 31. Nordhausen: Bautz. ISBN 978-3-88309-544-8.
  • Bernd Goebel (2014). "Einleitung". In Alfred Cyril Ewing: Ethik. Eine Einführung (Felix Meiner, Hamburg), vii–lxvii (contains a section on Ewing's life and works and a section on Ewing's moral philosophy). ISBN 978-3-7873-2469-9.
  • Edmonds, D., Eidinow, J. Wittgenstein's Poker. New York: Ecco 2001.
  • A C Ewing Papers at University of Manchester Library.


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