Susan Stebbing

Susan Stebbing Synopsis

Susan Stebbing (1885-1943) was an important figure in the development of analytic philosophy. She was author of the ground-breaking work A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), critic of what she saw as the inaccuracies in terminology and method of many of her most celebrated contemporaries, and originator of the concept of 'directional analysis', which was foundational to the 'Cambridge' school during the 1930s. She was also a leading proponent of public philosophy, and in books such as Philosophy and the Physicists (1937) and Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) she wrote for a general readership, exposing the dangers of misleading phrasing and implicit ideologies in the language used by authority figures such as scientists, politicians, and religious leaders. This volume is the first published selection of Stebbing's writings, bringing together sixteen papers from across the span of her thinking. The papers are grouped thematically into four parts, on 'Logic', 'Science', 'Analysis' and 'Ideology'. In the Introduction, Siobhan Chapman presents an overview of Stebbing's work and an account of the significance of each of the selected papers, and extensive notes offer the reader the opportunity to engage with the published works referred to in the papers. The volume includes a bibliography of Stebbing's numerous publications.