Marie Collins Swabey

Background

Swabey, Marie Collins was born on December 8, 1880 in Kansas City.

Education

Wellesley College. 1913. Manuscripts and Archives, University of Kansas, 1914. PhD, Cornell University, 1919.

Career

Instructor in Philosophy, Wellesley College, 1919 20: Instructor in Philosophy and eventually Professor Emeritus, New York University, 1924-1956.

Views

Swabey’s broad concern in all her work was to examine and justify the rational foundations of social structures. In Logic and Nature (1930) she argues that metaphysics is grounded on logical foundations. In The Judgement of History (1954) she rejects historical relativism and argues a case for the existence of moral absolutes. Her Comic Laughter (1961) is an acute conceptual analysis in which she carefully distinguishes comic from other kinds of laughter and discusses irony, satire, nonsense, incongruity, the tragic, the sublime and the ridiculous. She eschews biological and psychological explanations of comic laughter, dismissing Bergson's view that it is ‘the mechanical encrusted upon the living’ as belonging with psychological theories, and pursues a philosophical and logical enquiry which, she maintains, not only yields ‘a logical moment of truth’ but also provides 'an inkling, as it were, of the hang of things, sometimes even a hint of cosmic bcncficcnce’. All her writing reveals her conviction concerning the existence of an ultimate and ideal harmony that supports the multifariousness of mundane living.

Interests

• Political and social philosophy. Metaphysics.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Darwin, Arnold Toynbee and Ernst Cassirer.