G. E. M. Anscombe

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 was born to Gertrude Elizabeth (née Thomas) and Captain Allen Wells Anscombe, 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 went on to head 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.

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.

As an undergraduate in 1939 she had publicly criticised Britain's entry into the Second World War.

In 1941 she married Peter Geach.

Like her, Geach was a Catholic convert who became a student of 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 Ludwig 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:

"For years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: 'I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' ... I always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. I couldn't see my way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the central nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgenstein's classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought 'I have got this, and I define 'yellow' (say) as this' being effectively attacked."

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 ).

Wittgenstein appointed Anscombe as one of his three litterary executors and so she played a major role in translating and spreading his works.

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.

Anscombe visited Wittgenstein many times after he left Cambridge in 1947, and 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.

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 dated ) 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 (albeit with restrictions).

Her monograph Intention (1957) was described by Donald Davidson as "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle".

The continuing philosophical interest in the concepts of intention, action, and practical reasoning can be said to have taken its main impetus from this work.

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.