CFP: Susan Stebbing’s Influence on Contemporary Philosophy Topical Collection in Synthese

Call for Papers for “Susan Stebbing’s Influence on Contemporary Philosophy”

Guest Editor(s): Teresa Kouri Kissel and Maheshi Gunawardane

Topical Collection Description: Susan Stebbing was the first female Professor of philosophy in the UK, a founder of Analysis, and a president of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. She was concerned that advances in logic and logical tools were locked away in “the ivory tower.” To remedy this, she spent much of her career trying to bring logic and logical tools to the general public. She wrote several books on how to use logic to improve reasoning. One in particular, Thinking to Some Purpose, based on a series of lectures for BBC radio, achieved significant popularity. Another, A Modern Introduction to Logic, was a textbook on contemporary advances in logic at the time, and the first textbook which took seriously contemporary work in the field. Stebbing’s work was instrumental in helping non-academic people gain access to important academic work, helping general audiences become better reasoners. She used a series of logical tools, including developing a habit of thinking, asking intelligent questions and answers and the deductive process of reasoning, to educate the general public about logical reasoning. She was motivated by the need to help people see through biased media and political rhetoric, and to properly reason about the information they were being given.

On the more academic front, Stebbing's most recognized achievement was precisifying directional analysis, a form of analysis which starts with our commonsense beliefs and breaks them down into their component parts to help better understand what the world would be like if those beliefs were true. Stebbing held that several philosophers in her day (Moore and Russell, for example) used this type of analysis, but without an appropriately precise method to back up its practice. She suggested it as an alternative to the approach of the logical positivists, who she saw as starting essentially backwards, with our basic concepts, and building from there, rather than starting with what we know to be true and breaking down from there. She further engaged in philosophy of science, notably in her book Philosophy and the Physicists and in earlier work on Whitehead’s philosophy.

All of Stebbing’s work has applications to philosophical problems today. This Topical Collection will focus on Stebbing’s work on both logic and metaphysics, and its relationship to contemporary debates in those fields. Using an historical figure’s work to illuminate these contemporary debates has proven to be incredibly useful with more canonical figures (for example, Frege’s notions of sense and reference have become cornerstones in some areas of linguistics), and so we expect no less here. 

Appropriate Topics for Submission include, among others: 

• Stebbing’s Philosophy of Science

• Stebbing’s Philosophy of Language

• Stebbing’s views on metaphysics and their relationship to contemporary metaphysical issues

• Updating Stebbing’s logical tools for the 21st century

• Applying directional analysis to contemporary issues in philosophy

• Considerations of Stebbing’s place in the philosophical canon

• Feminist considerations of Stebbing’s work

• Stebbing’s relationship to other philosophers or philosophical positions

For further information, please contact the guest editor(s): Teresa Kouri Kissel, [email protected]

The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2025

Submissions via: https://www.editorialmanager.com/synt/default.aspx