Alfred Cyril Ewing FBA (/ˈjuːɪŋ/ YOO-ing; 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.

[1][2] From his entrance to University College, Oxford, Ewing's early academic career was, as Russell Grice remarks,[a] one of "almost unparalleled brilliance.

In 1923, Ewing was amongst the first Oxford students to be awarded a DPhil,[5] his (revised) thesis being published as Kant's Treatment of Causality (1924).

[13] The late 1930s saw the publication of "Meaninglessness"[14] and 'The Linguistic Theory'[15][16] two "powerfully argued" papers that, Brand Blanshard contends, "must have contributed much to the disintegration of positivism.

[18][19] 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).

[22] 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.

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.

"[29] Ayer recalls teasing the devout and "unswervingly honest" 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.

[31][17] 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.

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.