Siobhan Chapman

I have just signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan to write a book based on my current research project on the philosopher Susan Stebbing. Stebbing seems to me to be a very interesting and a very under-researched figure in the British analytic tradition of the early to mid twentieth century. She had close ties with the Cambridge school of analysis, focussed around G. E. Moore and associated with so-called ‘ideal language philosophy’. But her writings were increasingly illustrated by, and indeed focussed on, examples of everyday, naturally occurring language, an approach associated with the supposedly autonomous and even contradictory school of ‘ordinary language philosophy’. Perhaps even more significantly, in her later work, Stebbing focussed her attention on the analysis of ideologically loaded texts such as advertisements, newspaper editorials and political speeches, with a particular emphasis on revealing the assumptions and commitments underlying them. This type of analytic work is nowadays most readily associated with fairly recent developments in linguistics, such as critical discourse analysis.