Philosopher
Susan Stebbing
1885–1943
Also known as L. Susan Stebbing
British philosopher of the interwar years, a leading figure in the Cambridge School of Analysis and the first woman in the UK to hold a full professorship in philosophy.
Susan Stebbing was born in North London in 1885, the last of a fish merchant’s six surviving children. After a string of temporary teaching posts she became a lecturer at Bedford College, a women’s college of the University of London, in 1920, and in 1933 made the national papers as the first woman in Britain appointed to a full professorship in philosophy.
She helped establish the analytic tradition in Britain, institutionally as well as intellectually. Her Modern Introduction to Logic covered both Aristotelian logic and the new mathematical logic of Russell and Whitehead. In her later years her work turned increasingly to social and political questions. She died of cancer in 1943, at fifty-seven.
Key ideas
- Analysis and common sense
- With Moore and the Cambridge School she distinguished knowing that a common-sense proposition is true from knowing its correct analysis, and in 1932 she set out the presuppositions of that method of analysis.
- Language in use
- Philosophers must pay attention to the ways ordinary speech uses, and abuses, language, a theme that foreshadowed later work in philosophy and linguistics.
- Critical thinking for the public
- Philosophy and the Physicists criticised the language of popular science, and Thinking to Some Purpose that of political speeches, advertising and newspapers, applying logic to everyday reasoning.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- London
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- Logic and argument
Influences
Where these links come from
- Susan Stebbing drew on Bertrand Russell. Source: Michael Beaney and Siobhan Chapman, Susan Stebbing, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Susan Stebbing drew on G. E. Moore. Source: Michael Beaney and Siobhan Chapman, Susan Stebbing, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- A Modern Introduction to Logic, 1930
- Philosophy and the Physicists, 1937
- Thinking to Some Purpose, 1939
Sources
- Michael Beaney and Siobhan Chapman, Susan Stebbing, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy