Abstract Summary
In her Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), often considered the first textbook of analytic philosophy, British philosopher L. Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) presented a coherent long durée vision of the science of logic. Contrary to a caricature (popular then and now) that presents mathematical logic as an irruption of genius redeeming a heretofore worthless discipline, Stebbing construed the advent of mathematical notation and its attendant methods in logic as a cumulative triumph. She positioned the domains of logic, mathematics, and scientific method in relation to each other and within a reorganized disciplinary matrix she indicated new possibilities for the person of the philosopher. Over the course of her career Stebbing exhibited a vision of the philosopher as a public figure at a time when it remained rare for a woman to be recognized as a philosopher at all. She asserted the need for the rigors of logic in public discourse and likewise asserted herself as an authoritative representative of that science. Striving to render the latest mathematical logic accessible to as wide an audience as possible, she used its methods to analyze found examples of misleading political discourse and stressed the importance of argumentative clarity amidst the turmoil of the 1930s. By asserting the specifically democratic value of mathematized rigor, she posited a particular social role for the philosopher as an intermediary between modern science and everyday experience—a role she held to be urgently needed in the face of pervasive unscrupulous rhetoric in the age of fascism.
