Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5 (2):6-17 (2017)
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Abstract |
Susan Stebbing’s work on incomplete symbols and analysis was instrumental in clarifying, sharpening, and improving the project of logical constructions which was pivotal to early analytic philosophy. She dispelled use-mention confusions by restricting the term ‘incomplete symbol’ to expressions eliminable through analysis, rather than those expressions’ purported referents, and distinguished linguistic analysis from analysis of facts. In this paper I explore Stebbing’s role in analytic philosophy’s development from anti-holism, presupposing that analysis terminates in simples, to the more holist or foundherentist analytic philosophy of the later 20th century. I read Stebbing as a transitional figure who made room for more holist analytic movements, e.g., applications of incomplete symbol theory to Quinean ontological commitment. Stebbing, I argue, is part of a historical narrative which starts with the holism of Bradley, an early influence on her, to which Moore and Russell’s logical analysis was a response. They countered Bradley’s holist reservations about facts with the view that the world is built up out of individually knowable simples. Stebbing, a more subtle and sympathetic reader of the British idealists, defends analysis, but with important refinements and caveats which prepared the way for a return to foundherentism and holism within analytic philosophy.
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Keywords | metaphysics analysis ontology foundherentism Russell Stebbing |
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DOI | 10.15173/jhap.v5i2.2928 |
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Susan Stebbing’s Logical Interventionism.Alexander X. Douglas & Jonathan Nassim - 2021 - History and Philosophy of Logic 42 (2):101-117.
David Lewis's Place in the History of Late Analytic Philosophy: His Conservative and Liberal Methodology.Frederique Janssen-Lauret & Fraser MacBride - 2018 - Philosophical Inquiries 5 (1):1-22.
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2016-07-26
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