Thinking to Some Purpose

"This book was first published in 1936 and has long been out of print. It was finally republished this year. Susan Stebbing was a very brilliant, hardcore, analytic philosopher, logician, and philosopher of science. She was amazing in that she was a respected contributor to philosophy in the 1930s, when academic philosophy was almost completely inimical to women in Britain. She was also a Humanist and head of the British Humanist Association, at one time, what’s now called, Humanists UK. Sadly, she died relatively young, in 1943 (she was born in 1885). Probably because she died during the wartime, her reputation was affected by not being part of that post-war recovery in society, and she got forgotten. When people talk about the important women philosophers of the 20th century, she’s rarely mentioned, the attention goes to Iris Murdoch , or Philippa Foot, or Mary Warnock —the next generations in the post-war period. But as well as making contributions in the academic world, Susan Stebbing published this very popular book in the genre of critical thinking. She was committed to spreading the word about philosophy, and she thought that it was a very useful subject for everyone, particularly logic, because it helped people get their thoughts clear about the things that mattered most in society. She was writing this book well aware of the rise of fascism and where things were heading in Europe. In fact, it was published in 1938 in that nice turquoise, Pelican series of popular books. There’s a lovely addition to the wartime version: she didn’t write this but on the back it says, “For the Forces: When you’ve read this book, please leave it at your nearest post office, so that the men and women in the services may enjoy it too.” The idea is to pass the book around, that’s really important. I can imagine people had it in their back pockets (it’s a very thin book in its original form) and pulled it out when they were bored or waiting for something to happen, or in a bomb shelter. It’s about avoiding the pitfalls of lazy thinking. As a disclaimer, I should say I wrote a very short foreword to this 2022 reissue of the book, though I won’t get any financial benefit if you buy it. (I was already paid a small fee.) One of the most feted recent books about thinking was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Stebbing intuitively or from observation of how people fall into psychological patterns of error anticipated some of the themes of that book. She’s a forerunner, in some ways, of Kahneman, but she’s also—and this might be an obstacle for some readers—a very passionate and unrelenting advocate of strict logical thought. As far as she’s concerned, the clearest thinking is logically sound thinking where the premises are clear and true and you can deduce the conclusion. That might be a caricature, but she really, really pushes the need for clarity in the way that you think. She also pays attention to language and propaganda and things that are not strictly logical, but where she’s at her most strident, she’s talking about people making mistakes of logic or falling into fallacious patterns of thinking. The essence of this book is in her preface, where she says, “I’m convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly, without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in thinking are in part due to faults which we could to some extent overcome, were we to see clearly how these thoughts arise.” She says: “It’s the aim of this book to make a small effort in this direction.” So she doesn’t think that the book is going to cure this or stop the Second World War , but it’s a hopeful book nevertheless. She’s a really good example of a public philosopher. She’s knowledgeable about philosophy, and she’s concerned to communicate her ideas. She’s in touch with reality in that she draws from lots of contemporary newspaper discussions and events that have happened in recent history. She’s rigorous, but she’s writing for autodidacts, of which there were many in the 1930s, so she explains what she means. I’m sure she had a bigger impact than almost any other philosopher of her time on general thinking by the population, because those Pelican books, apart from being handed round amongst the forces, were printed in large numbers and were relatively cheap. She took the trouble to face outwards from the world of academe to ordinary people. The book is not in the least patronizing in the way that she does it. That’s part of her humanism as well, the underlying drive is that human beings can be better. We can all be better, we can all do better than we are. Something that can, in a small way, help improve everybody’s lot, is if they’re willing to put in the effort to think about how they’re thinking. That’s probably why I like what she does. I am interested not just in thinking about philosophy, but in trying to communicate to a wider audience. I think that everybody is a philosopher to some extent, when they reflect on the meaning of life, what they ought to do and how we should organize society, and so on, and that the long history of philosophy and contributions by contemporary philosophers have something to contribute to those discussions. Not everything, but there are contributions to be made. In the tradition of focusing on critical thinking as something which could be of much, much wider use I wrote a little book called Thinking From A to Z that’s in the same area as this book. I also did an interview about the best books on critical thinking which, interestingly, had the widest readership of any of the interviews that I’ve done for Five Books. Which makes the point that books like Thinking to Some Purpose have a huge potential effect on society. As long as they’re not claiming to offer a panacea, philosophers can really contribute to education in the general sense. What we need as participants in a democracy is people who recognize the difference between rhetoric and a good argument and are not swayed by surface detail but are able to analyze the way evidence is being used, counterarguments, implications, and so on. Those are exactly the sorts of things philosophers, if they’re any good, focus on. They’re not alone in that, but the subject encourages reflection. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There were three other books that I didn’t choose, but that I would like to mention in passing. It should be obvious that not all public philosophy is about critical thinking. There were two books published this year that I think are contributions to public philosophy, which are really about how we live at the level of individuals trying to make sense of their lives. There’s Skye Cleary book—it’s got different titles in different places, but the American title is How to Be Authentic , which uses Simone de Beauvoir ’s thought as a way into discussing, particularly, what it’s like to be a woman in the 21st century. That’s really a framework for discussing problems about how we live. Then there is Kieran Setiya’s Life Is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way , which, like Skye Cleary’s, could be thought of as almost in the self-help area. Like her book, it draws on great thinkers of the past and the present, to illuminate real problems that people have, and suggest ways that we can engage with them. And also there is Massimo Pigliucci ’s recent book The Quest for Character which uses Socrates and Alcibiades as a way into discussing leadership qualities. So those are very different from the book Susan Stebbing wrote, which took the tools of philosophy and showed how they apply to analyzing arguments and the patterns of thought that people fall into, particularly in the area of political debate. Setiya, Cleary, and Pigliucci are more in the area of self-development, whereas Thinking to Some Purpose is, amongst other things, a contribution to political education and to citizenship education."