Background
Stebbing, Lizzie Susan was born on December 2, 1885 in Wimbledon.
Logician: philosopher of science
Stebbing, Lizzie Susan was born on December 2, 1885 in Wimbledon.
Studied at Girton (Historical Tripos 1 1906, II 1907. Moral Sciences Tripos II 1908). Manuscripts and Archives, London, 1912.
DLit, London, 1931.
Taught at University of Cambridge, 1911-1924, King’s College, London, 1913-1915, Westfield College, London, 1914-1920, Bedford College, London, 1915-1920, 1920-1943. Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, London, 1933. Visiting Professor at Columbia University, 1931 2.
Fellow of Royal Historical Society, 1916.
Stebbing represents a generally realist approach to philosophy, although in the case of perception the realism is indirect: we perceive the sun indirectly by seeing a sensum directly (1929). Her first book. Pragmatism and French Voluntarism (1914), attacks the pragmatists on the nature of truth and the French voluntarists for assimilating the knower and the known. She came to philosophy via Bradley's Appearance and Reality, but her main interests lay in logic and philosophy of science. She made a pioneering and widely acclaimed attempt to combine in an introductory textbook (1930) the traditional syllogistic logic with modem developments due to Russell and others: this involved some epistemology and metaphysics, on which she also wrote various articles. Philosophy and the Physicists (1937) fiercely attacks the physicists Jeans and Eddington for misunderstanding the enterprise that science is about in a way that leads them to idealist conclusions. Eddington in particular is accused of what amounts to confusing the construction by the mind of a scientific theory with its construction of the world itself, and in the famous ‘two worlds' passage of treating alternative accounts of something as though they were accounts of two parallel things. Eddington’s use of the indeterminacies of quantum physics to defend free will is rejected as irrelevant because of the minute amounts involved, and Stebbing develops a compatibilist view emphasizing the agent rather than a mere passive series of causally related events. Later Stebbing turned briefly to ethics and politics, in Ideals and Illusions (1941) defending liberal values based on reflection against Realpolitik and both totalitarian and otherworldly ideologies, but some, thought not all, reviewers were lukewarm.