Emily Jones

Who was Emily Jones?

Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was an English educator and writer on logic and ethics, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, from 1903 until 1916. Her ideas were misrepresented by Bertrand Russell as his own.

She was educated at Girton, taking a first class in the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1880; was a resident lecturer on moral sciences, and after 1903 mistress. She translated, with Miss Hamilton, Hermann Lotze's Mikrokosmus; edited Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics and his Ethics of Green, Spencer, and Martineau; and wrote Elements of Logic; A Primer of Logic; A Primer of Ethics; A New Law of Thought and its Logical Bearing; Girton College.

Jones was the first woman recorded as having delivered a paper to the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. She spoke about James Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism on 1 December 1899, with the philosopher Henry Sidgwick chairing the meeting. Her views were regarded as original and influenced her colleagues. She spent her career developing the idea that categorical propositions are composed of a predicate and a subject related via identity or non-identity.