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". It is "widely considered a foundational text in contemporary philosophy of action" and has also had influence in the philosophy of practical reason."
Life Anscombe was born to Captain Allen Wells Anscombe and Gertrude Elizabeth (née Thomas) 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 headed 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, where her tutor was the archaeologist Dorothea Gray. 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 Ludwig 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 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 Wittgenstein stayed at her house in Oxford for a period in 1950. She 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 datedGormally, L. – Kietzmann, C. – Torralba, J. M., Bibliography of Works by G.E.M. Anscombe, Seventh Version – June 2012 The date in CP is "1957" and there is no date in the original pamphlet. However, according to the facts it must have been published in 1956. The Honorary Degree was conferred on June 20th. 1956 and the Bodleian stamp of the pamphlet is "11 July 1956". See Torralba, J. M., Acción intencional y razonamiento práctico según G.E.M. Anscombe, Pamplona: Eunsa, 2005, pp. 58-61.) 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.
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. On 5 January 2001, she died from kidney failure at Addenbrooke's Hospital at the age of 81, with her husband and four of their seven children at her bedside, just after praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary. Anscombe's "last intentional act was kissing Peter Geach", her husband of sixty years.
Anscombe was buried adjacent to Wittgenstein in the St Giles' graveyard, Huntingdon Road, (now the Ascension Parish burial ground). Her husband joined her there in 2013.
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 differed:
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). She edited and translated Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol 1. (1980).
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 is X'ing intentionally intentional action She is X'ing with the intention of doing Y or ... She is X'ing to Y intention with which or further intention in actingShe intends to Y or ... She has expressed the intention to do Y expression of intention for the future; (what Davidson later called a pure intending)
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.