The English Catholic philosopher and Wittgenstein literary executor whose Intention founded analytic philosophy of action, whose Modern Moral Philosophy initiated the late-twentieth-century virtue ethics revival, and whose essays on the ethics of war reshaped Catholic just-war thinking.
anscombe
English analytic philosopher (1919–2001), Wittgenstein's literary executor and translator, professor at Cambridge after Wittgenstein and Anscombe's own Oxford career, whose Intention (1957) founded modern philosophy of action and whose 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy initiated the late-twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics and reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy.
Life
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was born on 18 March 1919 in Limerick, Ireland, where her father Allen Anscombe was serving as a British army officer at the end of the First World War. The family returned to England soon after, settling in Sydenham, south London; her father became a schoolmaster at Dulwich College. Anscombe attended Sydenham High School and then St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1937, reading Greats (the Oxford classical-philosophical course covering ancient history, Greek and Latin literature, and ancient and modern philosophy).
The Oxford years brought two formative changes. First, conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1938, at nineteen — a conversion that would shape every aspect of her subsequent intellectual and personal life. Second, philosophical formation in the Aristotelian and analytic traditions then dominant at Oxford under figures including H. H. Price, J. L. Austin, and (a major influence on her) Donald MacKinnon.
In 1941 Anscombe married the philosopher Peter Geach, a fellow recent convert to Catholicism; the philosophical partnership would last sixty years. They had seven children. In an era when academic appointments for women with families were rare, Anscombe combined her teaching and writing with raising the seven children in a notably unconventional household; visitors to the Oxford and Cambridge homes described chaos, intellectual intensity, and the visible practice of the Catholicism that organized the household's life.
The pivotal philosophical relationship was with Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anscombe was a research student at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1942, and attended Wittgenstein's lectures and private classes in Cambridge through the 1940s. She became one of the three students (with Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright) whom Wittgenstein, in his will of 1951, designated as literary executors of his unpublished philosophical manuscripts. Anscombe's responsibility was particularly the translation and editing of the Philosophical Investigations, which she translated into English (jointly with Rush Rhees) for the 1953 first edition published by Blackwell. The translation, with its now-famous opening sentence — "When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered" — introduced Wittgenstein's later philosophy to the English-speaking world and remains the standard translation in continuous revised use.
The academic appointments came: Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1946, then Lecturer at Somerville from 1951, then — the major appointment of her career — Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1970, the chair Wittgenstein had held until 1947. She held the Cambridge chair until retirement in 1986 and continued to write and teach into the late 1990s. She died on 5 January 2001 at Cambridge, aged 81.
The public Catholic activism that ran through her career deserves note. Anscombe was arrested in 1956 for blocking the entrance to a doctor's office that performed abortions. She protested the awarding of an honorary Oxford degree to Harry Truman in 1956 on the ground that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had constituted murder of innocents — a protest she made formally in an Oxford Gazette objection, then in print as Mr Truman's Degree (1957). She was active in opposition to the legalization of abortion in Britain (the 1967 Abortion Act) and in opposition to nuclear weapons through the 1980s.
Intention
Intention (Blackwell, 1957; second edition 1963 with revisions and additions) is widely regarded as the founding text of modern analytic philosophy of action. The work, a tightly compressed monograph of approximately 90 pages, is one of the most influential single philosophical works of the second half of the twentieth century.
The central question: what is the difference between actions done intentionally and other physical movements? The familiar Cartesian answer — that intention is an inner mental state preceding and causing the action — Anscombe rejects on Wittgensteinian grounds. Intention cannot be identified by introspection of a separate mental act, since often there is no such introspectable act and intention is nonetheless present.
The Anscombean alternative: intentional action is action that falls under a description of which the agent can answer the question "Why?" with reasons rather than with causes. The same physical event — turning on a light switch — can be intentional under the description "turning on the light" but not under the description "alerting the burglar in the next room." The agent's reasons explanation — "I wanted to read," "to see what I was doing" — stands in a different relation to the action than a causal explanation would: it makes the action intelligible as an exercise of practical rationality rather than as a physical effect of antecedent conditions.
The analysis develops at length: the distinction of basic and derived actions, the structure of practical reasoning, the difference between expressing intention and predicting one's own behavior, the place of habit and skill, the relation of intention to belief and desire. Anscombe defends a broadly Aristotelian-Thomist position against the prevailing Humean view that intentional action must be analyzed in terms of belief-desire pairs causing behavior.
The book's influence has been continuous and major. Donald Davidson's Essays on Actions and Events (1980) operates in dialogue with Anscombe (even where reaching opposed conclusions). Harry Frankfurt's work on the will, John McDowell's account of practical reason, Sarah Broadie's Aristotelian moral psychology, and the broader Aristotelian-Anscombean wing of contemporary action theory all develop from Intention as a foundational reference. Recent scholarship by John Schwenkler (Anscombe's Intention: A Guide, Oxford University Press, 2019), Adrian Haddock, and others is producing the detailed commentary the compressed text rewards.
Modern Moral Philosophy
The article "Modern Moral Philosophy" appeared in Philosophy in January 1958. The article's twenty-five pages have shaped the subsequent half-century of Anglophone moral philosophy as as any other single short text of the period.
The three theses Anscombe defends:
- The concept of moral obligation, of moral ought, of what is morally right or wrong, and of the moral sense of should, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer survives, and are only harmful without it.
- The differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.
- It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.
The argument behind the first thesis is genealogical. The concepts of moral obligation and the moral ought make sense within a divine-command framework: they signify what a divine lawgiver commands. With the decline of belief in such a lawgiver — a decline well advanced by the early twentieth century in English-speaking philosophy — the concepts have lost their original meaning but have persisted with a kind of independent force that cannot be philosophically justified. Modern moral philosophy is the attempt to keep the vocabulary while abandoning the framework that gave it meaning; the result is an incoherent inheritance.
The positive recommendation: instead of moral-ought talk, return to the classical Aristotelian vocabulary of virtue and vice, of human flourishing and its frustration, of the kind of person one is and the kind of life one leads. Ethics is the philosophical reflection on the human good and the dispositions (virtues) that enable human flourishing. To recover this Aristotelian framework, however, philosophy needs a more adequate philosophy of human psychology than the prevailing belief-desire framework supplies — hence the third thesis.
The article's reception was slow but ultimately overwhelming. Philippa Foot, Anscombe's Oxford colleague and friend, developed the Aristotelian-naturalist framework in essays collected in Virtues and Vices (1978) and her major later work Natural Goodness (2001). Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) extended the critique of modern moral philosophy in different directions. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) gave the Anscombean diagnosis its most extended development and became the founding work of the late-twentieth-century virtue ethics revival.
By the late 1990s virtue ethics had become one of the three major positions in normative ethical theory alongside consequentialism and deontology — a status it had decidedly not enjoyed before Anscombe's article. The article is universally credited as the founding text of this revival.
Other Major Works
The collected papers (The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, 3 vols., Blackwell, 1981) cover an enormous range: papers on Wittgenstein, on Aristotle, on Aquinas, on causality, on the foundations of mathematics, on intention, on Hume, on ethics, on theological questions including transubstantiation, contraception, and the just war.
An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959) is one of the standard introductory commentaries on the early Wittgenstein. Three Philosophers (1961), jointly with Peter Geach, treated Aristotle, Aquinas, and Frege. The posthumous Human Life, Action and Ethics (St Andrews, 2005) and Faith in a Hard Ground (St Andrews, 2008) collect previously uncollected and unpublished material on philosophical theology and ethics.
Reception
Anscombe's reception has grown continuously. The combination of major contribution in philosophy of action (Intention) and philosophy of ethics ("Modern Moral Philosophy") would have placed her among the major twentieth-century analytic philosophers on either contribution alone; the combination of both, together with her Wittgenstein translation and the body of shorter papers, places her in the first rank of the period.
The Cambridge memorial conferences after her death in 2001, the establishment of the G.E.M. Anscombe Memorial Lecture, the recent multi-volume St Andrews edition of her late papers, and the steady stream of contemporary monographs (John Haldane, Roger Teichmann, Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, Cyrille Michon, Anselm Müller, Michael Wee) all testify to the continued growth of her reputation. The Anscombean lineage — the Aristotelian-Catholic-analytic philosophy of action and ethics that runs through Foot, MacIntyre, McDowell, Sabina Lovibond, Candace Vogler, Rosalind Hursthouse, and others — is one of the major living traditions in contemporary moral philosophy.
Significance
Anscombe's importance has three dimensions. As Wittgenstein's translator and literary executor, she shaped how the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century would be read in English. As philosopher of action, Intention founded the field as it has been continuously practiced since. As moral philosopher, the diagnoses of Modern Moral Philosophy and the broader Aristotelian-Catholic engagement with ethical questions initiated the virtue ethics revival that has reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy and continues to develop in the work of her successors.