Susan Stebbing

L. Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) was an important figure in British philosophy between the two world wars. Converted to analytic philosophy in 1917 by G. E. Moore, she played a major role in the development of analytic philosophy in the 1930s through her contribution to the so-called Cambridge School of Philosophy, which drew its inspiration from the work of Russell, Moore, and the early Wittgenstein. She published A Modern Introduction to Logic, which can be regarded as the first textbook of analytic philosophy, in 1930, and she was the first in the Anglophone philosophical community to critically engage with logical positivism. Her ideas were central to the debates about analysis that took place in the 1930s. In her later work, addressing a more general readership, she focused increasingly on ordinary language and its everyday use. She became interested in the ways in which language can be used to persuade and potentially to manipulate opinion—by scientists, the clergy, advertisers, journalists, and politicians, among others—and saw it as a philosopher’s duty to analyze and where necessary expose such uses. Stebbing’s work has been relatively neglected since her death but can be seen as prescient of how the study of language would develop subsequently in some areas of philosophy and also of the relatively new discipline of linguistics.