G. E. M. Anscombe

Abstract

G. E. M. Anscombe (b. 1919–d. 2001) is widely recognized as one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century. Donald Davidson described her monograph Intention (see Anscombe 1957, cited under Intention) as the most important work on action since Aristotle’s Ethics, and her much-anthologized paper “Modern Moral Philosophy” (see Anscombe 1958, cited under Anti-consequentialism) is the genesis of modern virtue ethics. Anscombe’s claim that “I” is not a referring expression (in her “The First Person,” cited as Anscombe 1975, cited under Self-Consciousness and “I”) remains as a provocative counterpoint to the consensus position among philosophers of mind. Alongside her own writing, she edited and translated much of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work. Her translation of the Philosophical Investigations—a task that also involved substantial editorial work—is viewed by many as authoritative. Given these credentials, one might expect to find Anscombe’s work well represented in the secondary literature. But in fact, only a tiny proportion of her published writings have attracted critical engagement. As this article highlights, some areas of Anscombe’s thought—for example, her writings on memory, mental events, and sensation—have received almost no attention in the literature, despite their insight and relevance, and even where her work has made a significant impact—for example, in ethics and causation—it has not been subject to scholarly study. It is really only in the area of philosophy of action that substantial and high-quality discussion of her thought has taken place. To date, the literature contains no detailed discussion of Anscombe’s philosophical method. Her main interlocutors are David Hume and Rene Descartes, and her contemporaries at Oxford—R. M. Hare, J. L. Austin, and Stuart Hampshire. Her aim is to recover premodern thinking—in particular the thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—about core topics in mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics (for example, human nature, mind-body relation, causation, substance, sensation, perception, human action, practical reason). However, her methods are those of post-linguistic-turn philosophy. In particular, she follows Gottlob Frege and, more explicitly, Wittgenstein in thinking that the way to study these topics is not as a scientist but as a logician or grammarian. Her concern is not the properties of material (or immaterial) objects but the formal order that belongs to our concepts and to human life in which they have their home. This explains the deep interconnectedness that is a feature of her work.