Marie Collins Swabey (1890–1966)

Marie Collins Swabey was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She received a B.A from Wellesley College in 1913, an M.A. from the University of Kansas the following year, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1920. She spent 30 years as a professor at New York University. She specialized in political philosophy, but also published articles on the philosophy of logic, on what makes circular arguments vicious or benign, religious tolerance, and a theory of comedy. These articles and others were compiled into three books: Logic and Nature (1930), The Judgment of History (1954), and Comic Laughter (1961). She was also a co-translator, with her husband William Curtis Swabey of two works from German by Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1923).