Elizabeth Anscombe

Early Life and Education

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was born on March 18, 1919, in Limerick, Ireland, to Alan Wells Anscombe, a schoolmaster, and Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe. The family moved to England, and she attended Sydenham High School in London before going to St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read Greats (classical languages, philosophy, and ancient history), graduating in 1941. She converted to Roman Catholicism while at Oxford, a commitment that shaped her philosophical work throughout her life.

Her postgraduate work took her to Newnham College, Cambridge (1942–1944), where she encountered Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was then working on the ideas that became Philosophical Investigations. The encounter was transformative. Wittgenstein recognized Anscombe as one of his very few genuine philosophical peers — she was one of the small circle of students he trusted to understand what he was doing — and she became his most devoted philosophical interpreter and his literary executor.

Wittgenstein and the Analytical Tradition

Anscombe translated Philosophical Investigations (with Rush Rhees, 1953), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (with Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright, 1956), On Certainty (with Georg Henrik von Wright, 1969), and several other Wittgenstein texts, making his later philosophy accessible to the English-speaking world. Her An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959) remains one of the most incisive interpretive studies of his early work.

But Anscombe was not merely a Wittgenstein commentator. She engaged the whole of the analytical tradition — Frege, Russell, Geach, Davidson, Hampshire, Ryle — with an independence of mind that produced a series of original contributions quite distinct from Wittgenstein's own concerns.

Intention: Founding Action Theory

Intention (1957), first published as a series of articles and then as a short, dense monograph, is Anscombe's most philosophically original work and is generally credited with founding the modern philosophical theory of action. The book operates through a deceptively simple question: what distinguishes intentional from non-intentional action? A man is pumping water into a cistern that supplies a house; he thereby poisons the occupants. His arm's movements are (let's say) intentional; the poisoning of the occupants may or may not be intentional. What is the difference, and what determines it?

Anscombe's analysis proceeds through several interrelated moves. She distinguishes between 'practical knowledge' (knowledge of what one is doing, as an agent) and 'observational knowledge' (knowledge obtained by observation of how things are). Intentional action is action under a description that the agent would accept as an answer to the question 'Why are you doing this?' — it is action whose explanation is 'the kind that is sought when we ask the reason for something, as opposed to the cause.'

This points to what she calls 'practical reasoning' — reasoning that terminates not in a belief but in an action. Drawing on Aristotle's practical syllogism, Anscombe argues that the formal structure of intention is teleological: the agent acts in light of a desirability-characterization — a description under which the action appears good or desirable. The connection between desire, belief, and action is not merely causal but rational: the agent's reasons are internal to the intentional character of the action.

The concept of 'direction of fit' — the idea that beliefs aim to match the world (mind-to-world direction) while intentions/desires aim to change it (world-to-mind direction), with actions being the event in which the practical syllogism is 'completed' in the world — was either introduced or crucially clarified by Anscombe and has become fundamental to philosophy of mind and action.

Modern Moral Philosophy: Reviving Virtue Ethics

'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) is perhaps the most consequential journal article in twentieth-century ethics. In eighteen dense pages, Anscombe argued three theses: (1) that moral philosophy had entered a philosophical dead end and should be set aside until we had an adequate philosophy of psychology; (2) that the differences between modern ethical theories (Kantian deontology, utilitarianism) are less important than their shared assumption that 'ought' and 'obligation' can function independently of any concept of divine law or natural law — and that this assumption makes them confused; (3) that the concept of 'moral ought' is a 'survival of an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives' and should be dropped in favor of Aristotelian concepts of virtue and human flourishing.

The article coined the term 'consequentialism' as a label for the view that the rightness of actions is entirely determined by their consequences — and deployed the term critically, arguing that consequentialism licenses monstrous conclusions (she had famously opposed the Oxford award of an honorary degree to Harry Truman in 1956, on the grounds that he had ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

The article's call to return to virtue and human flourishing rather than 'ought' and 'obligation' helped to inspire the virtue ethics revival associated with Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), and Rosalind Hursthouse.

Other Philosophical Contributions

Anscombe's philosophical range was remarkable. Her work on causation ('Causality and Determination,' 1971) challenged Humean regularity theories by arguing for a genuine, robust notion of causal necessitation in singular cases. Her work on the first person ('The First Person,' 1975) argued against both Cartesian and Lockean accounts of self-reference, influencing subsequent debates about self-consciousness. Her work on language, indexicals, and referring terms contributed to philosophy of language, while her Thomistic engagements with contraception and nuclear warfare placed her at the center of Catholic moral theology debates.

Academic Career

Anscombe was elected to the Somerville College, Oxford chair in 1970 (previously held by H.H. Price) — which she held until 1986 — and from 1970 to 1986 she was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, in the chair previously held by Wittgenstein. She and her husband, the philosopher Peter Geach, raised seven children while maintaining remarkable philosophical productivity. She died on January 5, 2001, in Cambridge.