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This volume is the first published selection of the writings of Susan Stebbing (1885-1943, an important figure in the development of analytic philosophy. Siobhan Chapman provides notes and an introduction presenting an overview of Stebbing's work and an account of the significance of each of the selected papers.
List of contents
- Part I. Logic
- 1: A Reply to Some Charges against Logic (1915)
- 2: Logical Constructions and Knowledge through Description (1931)
- 3: Mr Joseph's Defence of Free Thinking in Logistics (1933)
- Part II. Science
- 4: Materialism in the Light of Modern Scientific Thought (1928)
- 5: Nebulous Philosophy - Jeans and Eddington (1937)
- 6: The New Physics and Metaphysical Materialism (1943)
- Part III. Analysis
- 7: Substances, Events, and Facts (1932)
- 8: The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics (1932)
- 9: Logical Positivism and Analysis (1933)
- 10: Constructions (1934)
- 11: Directional Analysis and Basic Facts (1934)
- 12: Language and Misleading Questions (1939)
- Part IV. Ideology
- 13: Thinking (1936)
- 14: The Creed of a Dialectical Materialist (1938)
- 15: Ethics and Materialism (1939)
- 16: Philosophers and Politics (1939)
- Bibliography of Stebbing's Published Works
About the author
Siobhan Chapman is Professor in English at the University of Liverpool. She previously worked at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the University of Kent at Canterbury. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of philosophy of language, the history of analytic philosophy, pragmatics, and literary stylistics. Her publications include
The Pragmatics of Revision: George Moore's Acts of Rewriting (2020),
Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense (2013),
Language and Empiricism: After the Vienna Circle (2008), and
Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist (2005).
Summary
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.
