A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #11–Susan Stebbing.

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*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #11

11. Susan Stebbing

Susan Stebbing and her book, Thinking to Some Purpose (Stebbing, 1939/2022)

Susan Stebbing was one of the giants of 20^th-century Analytic philosophy and was the very first woman in Great Britain to receive a chair in philosophy (at Bedford College in London). Her work was very much in the Moorean tradition, but applied to the state of the world. That is, while G.E. Moore called for clarity and common sense about whether he had a hand, Stebbing was calling for clarity and common sense as a foil against totalitarianism around the world. Like the members of the Vienna Circle, she was proposing exact thinking as an antidote for demented times.

Schuringa’s potted biography informs us that Stebbing was “born in a middle-class home, and privately educated at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich,” but neglects to tell us that she was orphaned at age 16, suffered from some unspecified childhood disease, and also suffered her entire life from Ménière’s disease—a condition that could lay her up for days with severe vertigo. She acquired cancer around 1941, and subsequently died of it in 1946, at age 56.

Stebbing was perhaps more closely aligned with the Vienna Circle than anyone else in England, even more than Wittgenstein, oddly enough. And I would say certainly more so than A.J. Ayer, in that her understanding of the project was closer to what was going on in Vienna. (Ayer is one of the people who suppressed the political aspect of their project, thus giving ammunition to detractors like Schuringa). Stebbing, unlike Ayer, seemed to understand and internalize the Vienna Circle project—in particular, the idea that the point of scientific philosophy and rejecting metaphysics was to better the human condition. Before receiving her Chair in England, she was a visiting professor for two years at Columbia University in New York, and one of her students, named P. Magg, had this to say about her project:

Logic had been to us a field in which we were supposed to be objective, rational, neutral, scientific and even aloof from the affairs of the world …. But here we found a different kind of logician … who made it clear that reason and logic, mind and science, had important services to perform in the very problems of the relation of society to man, of man to society.

Her book Thinking to Some Purpose, which is still in print, pursued this idea, bringing with it an early analysis of propaganda. There is also a section on “potted thinking,” which would be useful to some writers today. One of her famous lines is that a free press and democratic institutions are insufficient to maintain a democracy when confronted by “our stupidity and by those who take advantage of that stupidity.” A sort of intellectual hygiene was required in addition to the free flow of information.

This positivist approach was also reflected in her projects to communicate with the general public and not merely with specialists. Her biographer, Siobhan Chapman, described some of her projects in her book Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense (Chapman, 2013).

Stebbing was one of a group of writers and thinkers who established a new journal for a general educated readership, The Modern Quarterly, in 1938. It was an explicitly left-leaning journal, published by the Socialist Victor Gollancz, and associated with The Left Book Club, an organisation committed to fighting Fascism. The opening statement of aims for the journal, to which Stebbing as editorial council member implicitly added her name, comments on the link between idealism and the dangers of Fascism. It identifies a recent trend towards scepticism concerning the validity of scientific thought, and continues:

From scepticism of this kind to that mysticism which would deny the existence of a world outside the mind or the possibility of knowing anything about it is a short step. Already in the Fascist countries this tendency has reached its most extreme expression, as a national cult cynically enforced by an authoritarian state.

Schuringa wants us to know that he is unimpressed, and his dismissiveness of Susan Stebbing is something to behold. Here is what he says:

Stebbing’s efforts, which might be compared to present-day efforts to apply “critical reasoning” to political issues, are disappointing. With little to contribute other than her toolbox of Moorean analysis—containing tools that no one had as yet managed to sharpen—and lacking much knowledge of the social world, the promise of Stebbing getting some significant purchase on the real world remained unfulfilled. (Schuringa, 2025)

Susan Stebbing was “lacking much knowledge of the social world?” My friends, she started a girls school in Hamptead, London in 1915, which she had to move to Tintagel, Cornwall, during World War II. During the German “Blitz” bombing of London, in 1941, she was president of the Ethical Union. That was an organization that, in its history, engaged in activities building non-religiously based projects in social welfare. Thus, over the years, it was involved in providing non-religious weddings and baby-namings, and sponsoring a series of lectures on themes ranging from women’s rights and racial equality to raising children without religion. More generally, the movement provided a platform for social work and progressive campaigning outside the auspices of churches and other religious organizations.

Now, we don’t know what the Ethical Union was involved with when Stebbing was president from 1941-1942, but we do know that she managed to keep it operational during the Blitz bombing campaign against England and in its immediate aftermath. It is also a fair guess that the Ethical Union was involved in religion-blind wartime assistance to the civilian population in England, because those were her interests at the time. We also know that Stebbing’s concerns at the time included helping Jews and other minorities escape Nazi Germany, as she assisted Rose Rand in her immigration to England, and, with the help of a letter from Albert Einstein, was able to get Otto Neurath and his partner out of incarceration (on their arrival in England they were classified as “enemy aliens.”)

But she wasn’t just helping philosophers. With her school and residence (Kingsley Lodge) vacated and all her students in Cornwall, Stebbing opened it to Jewish refugees and impoverished English children. She received money for the school from the friends she made while teaching in New York. Here is Chapman’s account of her correspondence with one of her donors (I believe, Sidney Hook’s wife):

In this [letter] she explains that Kingsley Lodge is now home to “at least 50” refugee children, as well as a number of English children from impoverished families, who paid no fees. She describes one example: “Heinz Rosenbaum has been with us just over a year. He was six when he came. His father, a Jew, had been in Dachau concentration camp; he managed to get out and come to this country, a complete nervous wreck. We did not know what had been happening to Heinz, but he was terrified. He would scarcely speak, never smiled, and shrank away in terror from all strangers. Now he has begun to talk to grown-ups, and sometimes to smile, and he looks likely to become a cheerful child in time. (Chapman, 2013)

Mind you that all this is going on while she was still running her school (now evacuated to Cornwall), fighting cancer, teaching at Bedford College (now evacuated to Cambridge), writing, and running the Ethical Union. All of it in the middle of the German bombing campaign.

I want to close this section by coming back to Schuringa’s take on Stebbing as “lacking much knowledge of the social world.” He actually wrote that. About Susan Stebbing. And he published it. In a book. And he put his name on the cover of that book.

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