This article examines how British philosophers of the 1930s grappled with the relationship between reason, emotion, and democratic citizenship in the context of a perceived “crisis of democracy” in Europe. Focusing especially on Bertrand Russell, Susan Stebbing, and John Macmurray, it argues that philosophers working from diverse philosophical perspectives shared a sense that the crisis of democracy was simultaneously a crisis of reason and one of emotion. They tended to frame this crisis in terms of three interrelated concerns: first, as (...) a problem of balancing or integrating reason and emotion; second, as a problem of the relationship between emotions and democratic citizenship; and third, as a problem of how to properly train or educate the emotions. Significantly, British philosophers addressed these issues most directly in writings for a non-professional audience, as they sought to translate their professional expertise into popular works that might rejuvenate democratic citizenship. This historical episode is a reminder of how philosophers were deeply engaged in the cultural politics of the interwar period and is a telling example of how personalist concerns were central to philosophy even as the “analytic revolution” was gathering steam. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to analyze Susan Stebbing’s views on the nature of clarity in the 1930s. I limit myself to this period because it allows for a contrast between her sophisticated and significant views on what I call ‘the standard conception of clarity’ with her view on ‘democratic clarity’ developed in her (1939) book, *Thinking to Some Purpose*. I contextualize her views with some alternative characterizations of clarity on offer among other early analytic philosophers (including brief (...) discussions of Carnap, Quine, Price, and Nagel). While my focus is on Stebbing, I show, thereby, that in the great age of clarification in early analytic philosophy there were was no clarity or consensus on the nature of clarity. This helps illuminate some of the by now well-known difficulties in treating analytic philosophy as a unified project. The other pay-off of my approach should be the start of taxonomy of the kinds of clarity in early analytic philosophy. (shrink)