Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Science

The Winter Term Talk Series 2025, organised by  Dr. Michele Vagnetti and Dr. Andreas Vrahimis, is dedicated to Women in the History of Analtic Philosophy and Philosophy of Science.

The first talk will take place on Wednesday, 15.01.2025, at 4.30 pm (CTE), only via Zoom.

Everyone is welcome to attend. Register here.

The whole program:

15.01: Dr. Andreas Vrahimis (University of Cyprus): Stebbing’s critique of Schiller’s pragmatism

Whereas early criticisms of pragmatist theories of truth by analytic philosophers like Russell and G.E. Moore are well known, and helped shape the ongoing debates on this topic, L. Susan Stebbing’s significant contributions to the debate have hitherto largely been ignored. At the outset of her career, Stebbing became embroiled in a controversy with F.C.S. Schiller, spanning multiple publications, in which she objected against his variant of the pragmatist account of truth. As Chapman notes, the debate is somewhat abstruse and ‘does not make very satisfactory reading’ (2013, 30). It involves multiple forms of miscommunication, largely due to Schiller’s failure, throughout the debate, to acknowledge the significance of some of Stebbing’s arguments. In this paper, I reconstruct the debate in a manner that clarifies the arguments on either side. I thereby re-evaluate the debate’s significance for understanding the development of Stebbing’s views and their position within the history of analytic philosophy’s early critical encounters with pragmatism. At stake in the debate is, primarily, the question whether the pragmatist tenet ‘all that is true works’ is logically convertible into the obverse claim that ‘all that works is true’. I demonstrate that this question originates in Moore’s prior objections against William James’ theory of truth. The debate is prompted by Schiller’s reply to Moore, in which he rejects that the pragmatist theory of truth entails this convertibility. He does this by attempting to account for falsehoods that work. In developing a series of detailed objections, Stebbing aims to demonstrate Schiller’s response to Moore to be inadequate. I show that, contrary to what has been commonly assumed in the recent scholarly literature, Stebbing’s (qualified) defence of Moorean theses began already at the outset of her career. In his multiple responses to Stebbing, Schiller ends up denying that pragmatism upholds a criterion for truth, but claims it only involves a specific view of confirmation. I argue that, once the misunderstandings are cleared away, the debate can be shown to have ended prematurely, with a number of challenges posed by Stebbing left unanswered by Schiller’s confirmationism.

22.01: Dr. Peter West (Northeastern University -London): Dorothy Emmet’s Moral Philosophy

Dorothy Emmet (1904-2000) was only the second woman in Britain to be a Professor of Philosophy, when she was appointed to the position at Manchester University in 1946. She succeeded Susan Stebbing and, like Stebbing, was the only woman in Britain to be a Professor of Philosophy upon her appointment (Stebbing died in 1943). There is currently almost no secondary literature on Emmet (West 2023 is an exception) and virtually no scholarship on her moral philosophy (aside from Larry Blum’s recent discussions of Emmet in connection to the Wartime Quartet).

Yet, Emmet’s work in moral philosophy makes for fascinating reading. As a student in Oxford she studied under A. D. Lindsay and, like Lindsay, felt almost immediately disillusioned by the moral philosophy she saw taking place around her, which seemed too abstract and detached from the real world. Emmet’s intuitions were further cemented during her summers as a student which she spent teaching Plato’s Republic to miners in Wales. In 1966, she published Rules, Roles and Relations. The central thesis of the text is that moral philosophy should draw on the insights of sociology. Sociology, Emmet argues, informs us that human relations and interactions are too complex and ‘intermingled’ to be subjected to the kind of abstract analysis that moral philosophers typically employ. In particular, Emmet argues that the roles we play in a society (roles like mother, sister, colleague, police officer, teacher, member of parliament, and so on) have a deep influence on the kinds of actions we perform and the morality of those actions.

In this paper, I will reconstruct Emmet’s approach to moral philosophy. I will also argue that, like Stebbing and (afterwards) members of the Wartime Quartet, Emmet felt that modern moral philosophy should take inspiration from Aristotle. Instead of focusing on linguistic analysis of terms like ‘good’ and on atomistic conceptions of interactions between agents, moral philosophy should focus on our character traits, virtues (or what Emmet calls ‘excellences’), and on our ways of living.

05.02: Dr. Giulia Felappi (University of Southampton): “There is no reason for the necessity of the ultimate principles of deduction.” Margaret MacDonald on Logical Necessity

This talk aims at contributing to the recent enterprise of rediscovering Margaret MacDonald’s views, by focusing on her reflections on the necessity of logic, a theme that runs through many of her papers and reviews. As it has been noted, MacDonald was profoundly influenced by Peirce, the Vienna Circle’s positivists, Stebbing and Wittgenstein, in particular the one of the lectures he delivered in the mid 1930s in Cambridge. Those authors surely form the background against which she developed her own views on the necessity of logic. But in this paper we will not aim at discussing her claims to detect those influences. Rather, we will focus on MacDonald’s claims themselves, and the reasons she put forward to support them. We will see both MacDonald’s negative views about what the necessity of logic is not (§1), and her positive view about what it is and how it supports her claim that it is in fact irrational to ask for a reason for the necessity of logic (§2). We will conclude by considering what she would reply now to defenders of dialethism and paraconsistent logics, to better show how her view on the necessity of logic is different from others, such as David Lewis’s (§3).

12.02: Dr. Suki Finn (Royal Holloway University of London): “Thinking (About Stebbing) To Some (Feminist) Purpose”

Susan Stebbing’s popular book, Thinking To Some Purpose, was first published in 1939, went out of print for many decades, and was finally republished in 2022. The relevance of and need for the book is as pertinent now as it was when it was written. This paper outlines its applicability to the contemporary political setting and positions it as a feminist text. As such, I think about Stebbing to some purpose, namely, some feminist purpose, and argue that this gives purpose to Thinking To Some Purpose in present times. Gillian Russell (2024) has deemed Thinking To Some Purpose to be feminist insofar as it can be utilised to serve feminist ends; Sophia M. Connell and Frederique Janssen-Lauret (2023) take Stebbing’s work to exemplify and promote epistemic virtues that one could take to be feminist; Bryan Pickel (2022) highlights Stebbing’s holistic view of thought that incorporates a persons social situation, which is reminiscent of feminist epistemology. I agree on all of these accounts and find further evidence to paint a feminist picture of Stebbing, arguing for the rightful place of Thinking To Some Purpose as a crucial book for and of feminism, inside and outside of academic philosophy.

19.02: Dr. Julia Franke-Reddig (University of Siegen and Université de Genève): Ilse (Rosenthal-)Schneider and Einstein on Kantian Philosophy

The name Ilse (Rosenthal-)Schneider is not well known today. However, she was a promising student of Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and Alois Riehl, publishing her dissertation on the space-time problem in the context of Kant and Einstein with Springer in 1921. Although prominent philosophers like Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach harshly criticized her interpretation of the relationship between transcendental philosophy and the theory of relativity, Einstein himself supported Schneider’s work, even after her exile to Australia in 1938.

In Australia, she never obtained a professorship but remained actively engaged in research and university life. Notably, she later became a key figure in the foundation of Australian philosophy of science. Systematically, Schneider advocated for a Neo-Kantian view, arguing that transcendental philosophy was compatible with the general theory of relativity. While I do not aim to determine whether her interpretation was correct, it is worth noting that Einstein—though not a philosopher and unfamiliar with Kantian philosophy—has often been associated with philosophical interpretations of relativity theory, particularly by thinkers who reject a transcendental perspective.

As Klaus Hentschel pointed out, Einstein evolved from being a conventionalist in 1917 to adopting a philosophical realist stance in later years. This evolution makes Schneider’s perspective on the philosophical interpretation of relativity theory particularly intriguing. She maintained close correspondence and professional exchange with Einstein until the end of his life.

In my talk, I will reconstruct Schneider’s position on the relationship between Kantian philosophy and relativity theory and compare it to Einstein’s comments on the subject. This analysis aims to propose an approach or an initial framework for a better understanding Einstein’s position regarding the philosophical implications of his theory.

26.02: Dr. Amanda J. Favia (Nassau Community College): What’s Self-love Got to Do with it? E.E. Constance Jones on the Deduction of Prudence from Benevolence

E. E. (Emily Elizabeth) Constance Jones (1848-1922) was a prominent figure in British philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known primarily for her work in philosophical logic. Jones, however, also made important contributions to ethics and moral psychology. This talk will focus on one of those contributions—Jones’s response to Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason”, a problem that Sidgwick never resolved to his own satisfaction. Sidgwick held that practical reason has an allegiance to two distinct ‘methods’: self-love (prudence) and benevolence (duty to others). While both methods are independently rational, they may potentially come into conflict. This, for Jones, presented “the most important difficulty of the system of [Sidgwick’s] Universalistic Hedonism”. As such, she returned to this problem a number of times in the course of her career producing several original and promising responses. In two of her most promising responses—what I will call the Argument from Temporal Irrelevance and the Argument from Mutual Dependency—Jones attempts to demonstrate a necessary connection between self-love and benevolence that subverts the problematic dualism. Ultimately, there is no actual conflict of methods, only an appearance of one. After a close analysis of these two arguments, I will consider some challenges to her view and argue that even if her arguments are not entirely successful in resolving the “dualism of practical reason”, they succeed in changing the course of the debate.

Past Talk Series