My Kind of English Philosopher By George Neumayr Observers of that rarest of species, the politically incorrect academic, should note with sorrow the passing of the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She died on January 5 in Cambridge, England, at the age of 81. Anscombe, to put it mildly, eluded easy categorization. A protege of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she distinguished herself as a quasi-Aristotelian at Cambridge University. But she married, had seven children, and converted to Catholicism, defending its most unpopular teachings in outspoken and unapologetic terms.
English philosophy is about as appealing and colorful as English cuisine.
But Anscombe escaped this dreary and aimless culture of analytic philosophy through a forthright rejection of Cartesianism. With Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, she argued that mind is not the measure of reality, but reality is the measure of mind. Moral philosophy formed a focal point for her intellectual life. She declared modern moral philosophy moribund, arguing that it had become a pathetic shell of skepticism, sustained only by concepts and categories from a Christian tradition it had long ago abandoned. The morality of an act is judged not according to its accidental consequences, but according to its conformity with the law of reason God has placed in human nature, she argued.