Susan Stebbing Quotes on Mind
Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) — the first British woman to hold a chair in philosophy and the founding editor of Analysis — gave early twentieth-century analytic philosophy its first full-length systematic textbook in A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), while her later Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) brought Cambridge analytic methods to public reasoning about wartime political claims. The central project is the careful logical analysis of the conceptual presuppositions through which philosophical and ordinary thought structure their objects — including the analysis of mental concepts, perception, and the unity of consciousness in Mind and Its Place in Nature (1937) — under the influence of Russell, Moore, and the broader Cambridge realist tradition. The framework, increasingly recovered by recent feminist and historiographical scholarship in analytic philosophy, supplies one of the principal early twentieth-century treatments of the philosophical analysis of mind in the British analytic style.
Quotes
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Attributed to Susan Stebbing:
“Logic is the art of clear thinking.”
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Attributed to Susan Stebbing:
“To think clearly is the duty of a citizen.”
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“I am convinced of the urgent need for democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognised ignorance. Our failures in thinking in part due to our faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise.”
As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), Preface -
“...we easily fall into the habit of accepting compressed statements which save us from the trouble of thinking. Thus arises what I shall call ‘Potted Thinking’.”
As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 63 -
“...potted thinking is easily accepted, is concentrated in form, and has lost the vitamins essential to mental nourishment.”
As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 63 -
“A mind in blinkers is a mind that is unfree.”
As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 241