G. E. M. Anscombe

G. E. M. Anscombe
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (18 March 1919 – 5 January 2001), usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. She was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
Anscombe was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and became an authority on his work and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations. Anscombe's 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term consequentialism into the language of analytic philosophy, and had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Her monograph Intention (1957) was described by Donald Davidson as "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle". The continuing philosophical interest in the concepts of intention, action, and practical reasoning can be said to have taken its main impetus from this work.
Life
Anscombe was born to Gertrude Elizabeth (née Thomas) and Captain Allen Wells Anscombe, on 18 March 1919, in Limerick, Ireland, where her father had been stationed with the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the Irish War of Independence. Both her mother and father were involved with education. Her mother was a headmistress and her father went on to head the science and engineering side at
Dulwich College.
Anscombe attended Sydenham High School and then, in 1937, went on to read literae humaniores ('Greats') at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She was awarded a Second Class in her honour moderations in 1939 and (albeit it with reservations on the part of her Ancient History examiners) a First in her degree finals in 1941.
While still at Sydenham High School, Anscombe converted to Catholicism. During her first year at St Hugh's, she was received into the church, and was a practising Catholic thereafter.
In 1941 she married Peter Geach. Like her, Geach was a Catholic convert who became a student of Wittgenstein and a distinguished academic philosopher. Together they had three sons and four daughters.
After graduating from Oxford, Anscombe was awarded a research fellowship for postgraduate study at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1942 to 1945. Her purpose was to attend Ludwig Wittgenstein's lectures. Her interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy arose from reading the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an undergraduate. She claimed to have conceived the idea of studying with Wittgenstein as soon as she opened the book in Blackwell's and read section 5.53, "Identity of object I express by identity of sign, and not by using a sign for identity. Difference of objects I express by difference of signs." She became an enthusiastic student, feeling that Wittgenstein's therapeutic method helped to free her from philosophical difficulties in ways that her training in traditional systematic philosophy could not. As she wrote:
After her fellowship at Cambridge ended, she was awarded a research fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, but during the academic year of 1946/47, she continued to travel to Cambridge once a week to attend tutorials with Wittgenstein that were devoted mainly to the philosophy of religion. She became one of Wittgenstein's favourite students and one of his closest friends. Wittgenstein affectionately addressed her by the pet name "old man" – she being (according to Ray Monk) "an exception to his general dislike of academic women". His confidence in Anscombe's understanding of his perspective is shown by his choice of her as the translator of his Philosophical Investigations (for which purpose he arranged for her to spend some time in Vienna to improve her German).
Anscombe visited Wittgenstein many times after he left Cambridge in 1947, and travelled to Cambridge in April 1951 to visit him on his deathbed. Wittgenstein named her, along with Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright, as his literary executor. After his death in 1951 she was responsible for editing, translating, and publishing many of Wittgenstein's manuscripts and notebooks.
Anscombe did not avoid controversy. As an undergraduate in 1939 she had publicly criticised Britain's entry into the Second World War. And, in 1956, while a research fellow, she unsuccessfully protested against Oxford granting an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, whom she denounced as a mass murderer for his use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She would further publicise her position in a (sometimes erroneously dated) pamphlet privately printed soon after Truman's nomination for the degree was approved. In the same she said she "should fear to go" to the Encaenia (the degree conferral ceremony) "in case God's patience suddenly ends." She would also court controversy with some of her colleagues by defending the Catholic Church's opposition to contraception. Later in life, she would be arrested protesting outside an abortion clinic, after abortion had been legalised in Great Britain (albeit with restrictions).
Having remained at Somerville College since 1946, Anscombe was elected Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 1970, where she served until her retirement in 1986. She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1967, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979.
In her later years, Anscombe suffered from heart disease, and was nearly killed in a car crash in 1996. She never fully recovered and she spent her last years in the care of her family in Cambridge. She died peacefully on 5 January 2001, aged 81, with her husband and four of their seven children at her hospital bedside just after praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary. Anscombe's "last intentional act was kissing Peter Geach", her husband of sixty years.
She had not said where she was to be buried and the family chose what is now the Ascension Parish burial ground, as it was the nearest one to their home. There was some difficulty in getting a full-size plot, where she could be buried without being cremated first. This was not possible in the new part of the cemetery, so the site finally obtained – after negotiation with Ely diocesan authorities – was that of an old grave, corner-to-corner with the plot where Wittgenstein had been buried half a century before.
Debate with C. S. Lewis
As a young philosophy don, Anscombe acquired a reputation as a formidable debater. In 1948, she presented a paper at a meeting of Oxford's Socratic Club in which she disputed C. S. Lewis's argument that naturalism was self-refuting (found in the third chapter of the original publication of his book Miracles). Some associates of Lewis, primarily George Sayer and Derek Brewer, have remarked that Lewis lost the subsequent debate on her paper and that this loss was so humiliating that he abandoned theological argument and turned entirely to devotional writing and children's literature. This is a claim disputed by Walter Hooper and Anscombe's impression of the effect upon Lewis was somewhat different:
As a result of the debate, Lewis substantially rewrote chapter 3 of Miracles for the 1960 paperback edition.
Work
On Wittgenstein
Some of Anscombe's most frequently cited works are translations, editions, and expositions of the work of her teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein, including an influential exegesis of Wittgenstein's 1921 book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This brought to the fore the importance of Gottlob Frege for Wittgenstein's thought and, partly on that basis, attacked "positivist" interpretations of the work. She co-edited his posthumous second book, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations (1953) with Rush Rhees. Her English translation of the book appeared simultaneously and remains standard. She went on to edit or co-edit several volumes of selections from his notebooks, (co-)translating many important works like Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) and Wittgenstein's "sustained treatment" of G. E. Moore's epistemology, On Certainty (1969).
In 1978, Anscombe was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class for her work on Wittgenstein.
Intention
Her most important work is the monograph Intention (1957). Three volumes of collected papers were published in 1981: From Parmenides to Wittgenstein; Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind; and Ethics, Religion and Politics. Another collection, Human Life, Action and Ethics appeared posthumously in 2005.
The aim of Intention (1957) was to make plain the character of human action and will. Anscombe approaches the matter through the concept of intention, which, as she notes, has three modes of appearance in the English language:
She suggests that a true account must somehow connect these three uses of the concept, though later students of intention have sometimes denied this, and disputed some of the things she presupposes under the first and third headings. It is clear though that it is the second that is crucial to her main purpose, which is to comprehend the way in which human thought and understanding and conceptualisation relate to the "events in a man's history", or the goings on to which he is subject.
Rather than attempt to define intentions in abstraction from actions, thus taking the third heading first, Anscombe begins with the concept of an intentional action. This soon connected with the second heading. She says that what is up with a human being is an intentional action if the question "Why", taken in a certain sense (and evidently conceived as addressed to him), has application. An agent can answer the "why" question by giving a reason or purpose for her action. "To do Y" or "because I want to do Y" would be typical answers to this sort of "why?"; though they are not the only ones, they are crucial to the constitution of the phenomenon as a typical phenomenon of human life. The agent's answer helps supply the descriptions under which the action is intentional. Anscombe was the first to clearly spell out that actions are intentional under some descriptions and not others. In her famous example, a man's action (which we might observe as consisting of moving an arm up and down while holding a handle) may be intentional under the description "pumping water" but not under other descriptions such as "contracting these muscles", "tapping out this rhythm", and so on. This approach to action influenced Donald Davidson's theory, despite the fact that Davidson went on to argue for a causal theory of action that Anscombe never accepted.
Intention (1957) is also the classic source for the idea that there is a difference in "direction of fit" between cognitive states like beliefs and conative states like desire. (A theme later taken up and discussed by John Searle.) Cognitive states describe the world and are causally derived from the facts or objects they depict. Conative states do not describe the world, but aim to bring something about in the world. Anscombe used the example of a shopping list to illustrate the difference. The list can be a straightforward observational report of what is actually bought (thereby acting like a cognitive state), or it can function as a conative state such as a command or desire, dictating what the agent should buy. If the agent fails to buy what is listed, we do not say that the list is untrue or incorrect; we say that the mistake is in the action, not the desire. According to Anscombe, this difference in direction of fit is a major difference between speculative knowledge (theoretical, empirical knowledge) and practical knowledge (knowledge of actions and morals). Whereas "speculative knowledge" is "derived from the objects known", practical knowledge is – in a phrase Anscombe lifts from Aquinas – "the cause of what it understands".
Ethics
Anscombe made great contributions to ethics as well as metaphysics. She is credited with having coined the term "consequentialism". In her 1958 essay "Modern Moral Philosophy", Anscombe wrote:
"Modern Moral Philosophy" is credited with reviving interest in and study of virtue ethics in Western academic philosophy.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford is named after her, and conducts bioethical research in the Catholic tradition.
As argued in the new philosophical and biographical monographs "Metaphysical Animals" and "The Women are Up to Something", Anscombe's ethical conversations with Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley, are increasingly recognised as forming an important development in post-war Oxford ethics, constituting a backlash against the shallow moral Kantian idealism, prescriptivism, and verificationism practised by other Oxford philosophers of earlier decades such as Prichard, R.M. Hare, and A.J. Ayer.
Brute and institutional facts
Anscombe also introduced the idea of a set of facts being 'brute relative to' some fact. When a set of facts xyz stands in this relation to a fact A, they are a subset out of a range some subset among which holds if A holds. Thus if A is the fact that I have paid for something, the brute facts might be that I have handed him a cheque for a sum which he has named as the price for the goods, saying that this is the payment, or that I gave him some cash at the time that he gave me the goods. There tends, according to Anscombe, to be an institutional context which gives its point to the description 'A', but of which 'A' is not itself a description: that I have given someone a shilling is not a description of the institution of money or of the currency of the country. According to her, no brute facts xyz can generally be said to entail the fact A relative to which they are 'brute' except with the proviso "under normal circumstances", for "one cannot mention all the things that were not the case, which would have made a difference if they had been." A set of facts xyz ... may be brute relative to a fact A which itself is one of a set of facts ABC ... which is brute relative to some further fact W. Thus Anscombe's account is not of a distinct class of facts, to be distinguished from another class, 'institutional facts': the essential relation is that of a set of facts being 'brute relative to' some fact. Following Anscombe, John Searle derived another conception of 'brute facts' as non-mental facts to play the foundational role and generate similar hierarchies in his philosophical account of speech acts and institutional reality.
First person
Her paper "The First Person" buttressed remarks by Wittgenstein (in his Lectures on "Private Experience") arguing for the now-notorious conclusion that the first-person pronoun, "I", does not refer to anything (not, e.g., to the speaker) because of its immunity from reference failure. Having shown by counter-example that 'I' does not refer to the body, Anscombe objected to the implied Cartesianism of its referring at all. Few people accept the conclusion – though the position was later adopted in a more radical form by David Lewis – but the paper was an important contribution to work on indexicals and self-consciousness that has been carried on by philosophers as varied as John Perry, Peter Strawson, David Kaplan, Gareth Evans, John McDowell, and Sebastian Rödl.
Causality
In her article, "Causality and Determination", Anscombe defends two main ideas: that causal relations are perceivable, and that causation does not require a necessary connection and a universal generalization linking cause and effect. Regarding her idea that causal relations are perceivable, she believes that we perceive the causal relations between objects and events.
In defending her idea that causal relations are perceivable, Anscombe poses a question "How did we come by our primary knowledge of causality?". She proposes two answers to this question:
By "learning to speak, we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts"
By observing that some action(s) caused a certain event
In proposing her first answer, that by "learning to speak, we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts", Anscombe thinks that by learning to speak we already have a linguistic representation of certain causal concepts and she gives an example of transitive verbs, such as scrape, push, carry, knock over.Example: I knocked over a vase of flowers.In proposing her second answer, that by observing some actions we can see causation, Anscombe thinks that we cannot ignore the fact that certain actions, which produced a certain event are possible to observe.Example: a cat spilled milk.The second idea that Anscombe defends in the article "Causality and Determination" is that causation requires neither a necessary connection nor a universal generalization linking cause and effect.
Anscombe states that it is assumed that causality is some kind of necessary connection.
Views of her work
The philosopher Candace Vogler says that Anscombe's "strength" is that "'when she is writing for [a] Catholic audience, she presumes they share certain fundamental beliefs,' but she is equally willing to write for people who do not share her assumptions." In 2010, philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that Anscombe was "perhaps the last great philosopher writing in English". Mary Warnock described her as "the undoubted giant among women philosophers" while John Haldane said she "certainly has a good claim to be the greatest woman philosopher of whom we know".
Increasingly, there is recognition of Elizabeth Anscombe as an unlikely feminist role model, not so much for the content of what she said, but for her strong example in her personal life as a professional philosopher at the top of her game in conjunction with being the mother of a very large family. It is clear from her actions that Anscombe believed that she (and presumably other women) had a rightful place in the public sphere and in the discussion of important philosophical and political matters. It is also clear that she did not believe that women's reproductive role as child-bearers should thereby relegate them to toiling exclusively in the domestic sphere at the expense of their public life. In some cases, her solution to the conflict between care and work faced by many professional women seems to have been to have imported the public sphere activity and philosophical discussion into the very domain of her own home. Michael Dummett, for example, recollected being invited to a discussion of philosophy at her house soon after she had returned from the hospital to give birth to a child. It is clear that this solution was made possible in part by enormous stamina, but also a thorough disregard for bourgeois convention concerning the proper role and deportment of married women and mothers. In her willingness to discard limiting conventional social expectations regarding her gender role as a woman, it could be argued that Anscombe was (among all her other identities), a trailblazing career woman and old-fashioned egalitarian feminist. With her other identities as a Catholic philosopher and an analytic Wittgensteinian, this identity of egalitarian feminist and career woman sits somewhat oddly. But there can be no doubt about the rich manifold of identities she did possess.
Bibliography
Books
Three Philosophers. With P. T. Geach. 1961.
Human Life, Action and Ethics. Edited by Mary Geach; Luke Gormally. St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs. 4. Exeter, England: Imprint Academic. 2005.
(in Spanish). Edited by J. M. Torralba; J. Nubiola. Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones de la Universidad de Navarra S.A. 2005. .
Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics. Edited by Mary Geach; Luke Gormally. St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs. 11. Exeter, England: Imprint Academic. 2008.
From Plato to Wittgenstein. Edited by Mary Geach; Luke Gormally. St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs. 18. Exeter, England: Imprint Academic. 2011.
Papers
XIV.—
Festschriften
References
Citations
Sources
Anscombe (1957).
Further reading
External links
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, 1919–2001 Teichman, Jenny (2003). Proceedings of The British Academy 115, p. 31-50
Great Thinkers: Jane Heal FBA on Elizabeth Anscombe FBA British Academy blog podcast with Rachael Wiseman (13 May 2019)
1919 births
2001 deaths
20th-century British philosophers
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Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge
Alumni of St Hugh's College, Oxford
Analytic philosophers
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British Roman Catholics
Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club
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Converts to Roman Catholicism
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