Susan Stebbing and the Early Reception of Logical Empiricism in Britain

Susan Stebbing

“…Urmson, 1956;Passmore, 1966) focus on her views on metaphysical analysis. Many recent commentators (Beaney, 2003;Milkov, 2003;Beaney, 2016) do the same but tend to describe her view repeatedly as 'Moorean' (see also Section 1). 4 Milkov even applies Moore's name to a position which Stebbing claimed as her own, giving the name 'Moore's directional analysis' (Milkov, 2003: 358) to what Stebbing herself describes (in a paper about Moore) as 'an analysis I once called "directional analysis" ' (Stebbing, 1942: 527).…”

“…Such a narrow focus leaves no room for female founders, even ones as pivotal as Stebbing, nor for early analytic philosophers who were not followers of the 'Great Men', but critics or independent thinkers, no matter how analytic their work was thematically. Although some scholarly work on Stebbing has appeared in recent years, such work has often either been primarily biographical or tended to concentrate on her relationship to the canonical 'founding fathers' (Beaney, 2003(Beaney, , 2016Milkov, 2003). An informative intellectual biography by Siobhan Chapman (2013) supplies a rich array of facts about Stebbing's life and her correspondence beyond what this short publication can cover but concentrates on Stebbing's life and on connections between her thought and contemporary thinking about ordinary language.…”

“Bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy”: Labels that keep women out of the canon

“…Her friend and near‐contemporary A. J. Ayer is typical in describing her as “very much a disciple of Moore” (1977, 71). Several recent commentators also describe Stebbing several times as a “Moorean” (Milkov 2003, 355, 358; Beaney 2016, 242, 245–46, 248–50, 253–54; Beaney and Chapman 2018, §§ 3, 4). They even apply Moore's name to positions that Stebbing claimed as her own original views, as when Milkov gives the name “Moore's directional analysis” (Milkov 2003, 358) to what Stebbing herself describes (in a paper about Moore) as “an analysis I once called ‘directional analysis”’ (1942, 527).…”

Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication

“…Attending to Stebbing's work sharpens our understanding of the early British reception of logical positivism prior to Language, Truth and Logic and draws attention to early criticisms of the principle of verifiability more interesting than the well-worn objection that it fails to be meaningful by its own criteria. 5 As Michael Beaney (2016) also notes, given Stebbing's prominence and that her work was published in high-profile venues like Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind, she surely had a role in shaping the reception of logical positivism. Finally, following Richardson (2017), I think foregrounding Stebbing's work paints a fuller picture of how logical positivism came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the early analytic British philosophers.…”