Susan Stebbing

Works

• 1930A Modern Introduction to Logic

  One of the first textbooks in English to join traditional logic with the new logic of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, including Russell’s theory of descriptions, together with a discussion of scientific method; revised in 1933.

• 1933Logical Positivism and Analysis

  Lecture to the British Academy that distinguishes the analysis practised in Cambridge, which starts from what we already know and seeks its ultimate constituents, from the logical positivists’ construction of formal systems; against Carnap she rejects methodological solipsism.

• 1939Thinking to Some Purpose

  Pelican book that grew out of a series of talks the BBC had commissioned from her, which illness prevented her from giving: it analyses arguments in political speeches and newspapers – among them “potted thinking”, convictions taken over in compressed form without being thought through – in the conviction that a democracy needs citizens who think clearly.

Position

Stebbing is on the map as a logician and as a representative of the Cambridge school of analysis between the wars. Her “A Modern Introduction to Logic” (1930) was one of the first textbooks in English to present the new logic of Principia Mathematica alongside traditional logic. In “The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics” (1932) and “Logical Positivism and Analysis” (1933) she distinguished “directional” analysis, which starts from facts we already know and seeks their ultimate constituents, from the “postulational” method of building formal systems; against Carnap she rejected the constructional systems of the logical positivists and their methodological solipsism, and she held that they put the question of meaning before the question of truth. In “Philosophy and the Physicists” (1937) she criticised the astronomers Arthur Eddington and James Jeans for drawing idealist conclusions from modern physics in their popular books. “Thinking to Some Purpose” (1939), written for a broad public on the eve of war, analysed the arguments of politicians and newspapers and argued that democracy depends on citizens who can think clearly; “Ideals and Illusions” (1941) turned to moral and political ideals. Early accounts saw her mainly as a follower of Moore; recent research (M. Beaney, S. Chapman) stresses her own positions and her link to the later philosophy of ordinary language, and Max Black took an excerpt from “Thinking to Some Purpose” into his textbook “Critical Thinking” (1946).

Life & context

Lizzie Susan Stebbing was born on 2 December 1885 in North Finchley near London. In 1904 she went to Girton College, Cambridge, to read history and then took the first part of the Moral Sciences Tripos; in 1912 she gained an MA in moral science at King’s College London with a thesis published in 1914 as “Pragmatism and French Voluntarism”. After short and part-time posts she became a lecturer at Bedford College, London, in 1920, and in 1933 professor there – the first woman in Britain to hold a full professorship in philosophy. She was president of the Mind Association (1931–32) and of the Aristotelian Society (1933–34), and in 1933 among the founders of the journal “Analysis”. In 1934 she invited Rudolf Carnap to lecture in London, where he met Russell and A. J. Ayer for the first time. In the 1930s she gave much time, influence and money to rescuing refugee scholars and children from Germany and the countries occupied by the Nazi regime. She died of cancer on 11 September 1943 at Northwood, Middlesex.

Further main works

• Pragmatism and French Voluntarism (1914)
• The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics (1932)
• Logic in Practice (1934)
• Philosophy and the Physicists (1937)
• Ideals and Illusions (1941)
• A Modern Elementary Logic (1943)
• Men and Moral Principles (posthumous, 1944)