Friendly Fire: Did Margaret Macdonald Contribute to Susan Stebbing's Exclusion from the History of Analytic Philosophy?

This paper presents the case of Margaret Macdonald's (1903–1956) posthumous treatment of Susan Stebbing (1885–1943). After Stebbing's death, Macdonald—her Ph.D. student and collaborator—wrote an early history of analytic philosophy in which Stebbing's work is credited to Bertrand Russell (specifically, her account of ‘directional analysis’). The paper argues that this case contains two important lessons for practitioners of the history of philosophy engaged in scholarship recovering the work of women in philosophy's history. First, that we should not expect any subject of historical scholarship to be morally infallible. And, second, that cases such as this emphasise the importance of social context when it comes to understanding marginalised figures in philosophy's history.