Susan Stebbing 1885 – 1943

L. Susan Stebbing was a British analytic philosopher and the first woman in the United Kingdom to hold a full professorship in philosophy, at Bedford College, London. A pupil of W. E. Johnson at Cambridge, she produced major works in logic, including A Modern Introduction to Logic, and engaged the new physics in Philosophy and the Physicists. Her wartime book Thinking to Some Purpose argued that clear thinking is a duty of citizenship and exposed the loose reasoning of public life and propaganda. She died of cancer in 1943.

Lizzie Susan Stebbing was born in 1885 in north London, the youngest of six children of a barrister. She read moral sciences at Girton College, Cambridge from 1906, took her master's at the University of London in 1912 with a dissertation on pragmatism, and from 1915 taught at Bedford College for Women in London, where in 1933 she was made the first woman to hold a chair of philosophy at any British university.

Her major works are A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), the celebrated polemical Philosophy and the Physicists (1937), Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), and the textbook A Modern Elementary Logic (1943). She was an editor of the journal Analysis from its founding in 1933 and one of the principal organizers of British analytic philosophy in the inter-war period. She campaigned actively, in the 1930s, on behalf of refugee scholars and Czech and German exiles.

Stebbing brought the techniques of analytic philosophy to bear on the popular metaphysical interpretations of physics by Eddington and Jeans, and on the public rhetorical confusions she dissected in Thinking to Some Purpose, the first British 'public philosophy' bestseller by a woman. Recent recovery of her work has placed her alongside Anscombe and Foot in the genealogy of British women in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. She died in London in September 1943 of cancer.