G. E. M. Anscombe 1919–2001
Biography
G. E. M. (Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret) Anscombe (1919–2001) graduated from St. Hugh’s College, Oxford in 1941 with a First in Classics and Philosophy (Literae Humaniores). In 1942, she went to Newnham College in Cambridge to study with Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whom she closely collaborated until his death. After a career as Research Fellow (1946) and Teaching Fellow (1964) at Somerville College, Oxford, she returned to Cambridge as elected Chair of Philosophy. She served at Cambridge until her retirement in 1986.
During her time at Sydenham High School, Anscombe converted to the Catholic faith. She married fellow philosopher and Catholic convert Peter Geach in 1941, who joined her in studying with Wittgenstein. They had three sons and four daughters.
Anscombe made several groundbreaking contributions to twentieth century philosophy and is seen as one of the most brilliant philosophers of her time. She is also seen as a fierce person: for instance, she publicly denounced giving Harry S. Truman an honorary degree at Oxford, because according to her his use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki made him a mass murderer.
She worked on a wide range of topics in ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Her seminal monograph Intention, published in 1957, sparked extensive debate in the philosophy of action and remains widely discussed. Her ethics paper Modern Moral Philosophy (1958) not only coined the term consequentialism but also has been a key impetus for modern virtue ethics. In general, Anscombe introduced classical philosophical thought, especially as found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, to post-linguistic turn analytic philosophy—carving out a new methodology now known as analytic Aristotelianism or analytic Thomism.
Anscombe is also known for her work as Wittgenstein’s editor, translator, and commentator, and, after his death, as one of the executors of his work. Her translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) required substantive editing on her part and is used to this day.
Anscombe spent the last years of her life in the care of her family in Cambridge, suffering from several ailments, and died age 81. Since her death, the interest for her philosophical legacy has only increased.
Selected Bibliography
(1957). Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
(1958). Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy 33, 1–19.
(1958). On brute facts. Analysis 18(3), 69–72.
(1971). Causality and Determination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1975). The first person. In S. D. Guttenplan (Ed.). Mind and Language (pp. 45–64). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1981). The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, (Vol. 1–3). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Abstract
Reigning orthodoxy in the philosophical study of human rational capacities, such as being able to act intentionally and to reason, is to characterize them in causal psychological terms. That is, to analyze these capacities in terms of mental states and their causal relations. It is against this background that the work of G.E.M. Anscombe has gained renewed interest. The main goal of this chapter is twofold. First, I will explicate Anscombe’s philosophical approach by analyzing her account of intentional action and by relating it to the misperceptions of that account in (the history of) the philosophy of action. Importantly, Anscombe holds that an analysis of intentional action in terms of what it is, e.g., an event with certain specific features, cannot provide non-circular explanations. Instead, following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Wittgenstein, Anscombe seeks to explicate intentional action in terms of its form, i.e., the way in which it exists. The second aim of the chapter is to show the import of Anscombe’s approach by applying it to the philosophy of reasoning. After discussing two main problems for the current orthodox view in epistemological debates on reasoning, I will propose an alternative Anscombe-inspired view of reasoning. In this so-called form view of reasoning, reasoning is characterized as a tool to drag out implications, embodied in judgments of the form p as following from q. The upshot of the chapter is that concepts of our rational capacities do not depict certain psychological states or processes, but rather our involvement with rational connections that exist in our lives and practices.
[I]nference is something separable from the attitude of the one who is making it.
—Anscombe 1989, 397.
Many thanks to the organizers and audience of the Women in Parenthesis Workshop (VU Amsterdam, 2019), and to Lieke Asma, Niels van Miltenburg, Dawa Ometto, the editors of this volume and an anonymous referee for many helpful suggestions.
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Notes
- 1.
Stoutland, for instance, notes that “[p]hilosophers of a new generation, who are unwilling simply to take the dominant account of action for granted, have sought something different, which they have found in Anscombe” (2011a, 3). See for a very interesting project on Anscombe and the other women philosophers of the so-called wartime quartet: https://womeninparenthesis.co.uk/ and Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 87 (2020).
- 2.
What is striking in this regard is that there is an earlier draft version of Intention with comments by Philippa Foot, where Anscombe presents the arguments in a more linear style (see Haldane, 2020, 41). The existence of this earlier version serves to prove that the non-linear style in Intention was on purpose and an indication neither of the unsystematic nature of the ideas represented, as Dancy stated, nor of their rudimentary state, as Heath claimed (Dancy, 28; Heath, 282; both quoted in Wiseman, 2016, 1–3).
- 3.
This thesis will be discussed further on.
- 4.
For an overview of the relation between Anscombe’s and Davidson’s work (or CTA more broadly), see Hornsby (2011), Lavin (2013), Marcus (2012), Stoutland (2011a). My aim is not to give an overview of similarities and differences between the two, let alone to do so comprehensively, but rather to relate the contrast in such a way that it suffices to show how distinctive Anscombe’s approach is.
- 5.
- 6.
It thus seems impossible to explain how, as Davidson claims, “rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation” (1963, 685). Another important worry for CTA is that explanations consisting of rationalization and causation seem to exclude each other. This is a difficult issue and depends on views of rationalization and causation. Anscombe, for instance does not think they exclude each other if causation is understood in an Aristotelian/Thomistic way, namely as formal cause (Anscombe, 1957, § 48; Thompson, 2008).
- 7.
There is a difference in terminology between Anscombe and most contemporary action theory. Where Anscombe uses ‘action’ in its colloquial connotation (i.e., things we do, perhaps unintentionally), most contemporary action theory reserve ‘action’ for intentional action only.
- 8.
“Why did you give a start?” answered by “I thought I saw a face in the window.”
“Why did you call for a taxi?” answered by “I am going to the airport.”
- 9.
According to Ford, there is a striking analogy to be made between what Anscombe is doing and what Frege did in his inquiry into the concept of number: “In what follows, therefore, unless special notice is given, the only “numbers” under discussion are the positive whole numbers, which give the answer to the question “How many?”” (quoted in Ford, 2015, 131). (And hence the topic does not entail fractions, negative numbers, or irrational ones.) Frege’s nexus is thus: (1) a countable, (2) How many?, (3) number.
- 10.
Doug Lavin introduced this terminology, although he does not literally call it a decompositional approach, but “a decompositional conception of action” and “a decompositional analysis” (2013, 278–79).
- 11.
This is a famous example from Wittgenstein: “Let us not forget this: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm goes up. And the problem arises: What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” (1963, § 621). It is one of the leading questions for those pursuing a decompositional analysis of intentional action, probably to Wittgenstein’s aversion.
- 12.
Doing justice to the different interpretations of Anscombe’s method, especially exploring whether the approach is confined to Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation (cf. Diamond, 1991, 2019; Wiseman, 2016) or whether it includes making metaphysical claims (Foot, 2001; Haldane, 2004; Thompson, 2008), would lead too far astray from the question of the relation between rational capacities and psychological processes. Given the claims she makes in Intention—for instance, that she sides with Aquinas in claiming that practical knowledge is the cause of what it understands—I cannot but conclude that she makes metaphysical claims too. But then one should ask what is meant by ‘metaphysical claim’ and whether that kind of metaphysical claim is not allowed for on the more Wittgensteinian interpretation—which just underlines the fact that the question of how these interpretations relate to one another and which should be favored, is a topic for a different paper. For the current chapter, a general idea of her approach suffices to bring into focus an alternative view of the relation between rational capacities and psychology.
- 13.
- 14.
Hence, this does not amount to a behavioristic picture of intentional action for the main reason that the agent consciously acts—the agent has practical knowledge of what she is doing. The idea is that the question ‘Why?’ can only be given application by the agent if she knows what she is doing. The role of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s account is left out of the discussion (for the most part), because to understand the idea and role of practical knowledge, you already need to understand that Anscombe’s philosophical approach is different from the standard decompositional approaches in philosophy of action. For a more complete overview of Anscombe’s account of action and of the concept of intention, see Falvey (2000), Ford et al. (2011), Lavin (2015).
- 15.
This question was raised by an anonymous referee.
- 16.
At least, this is the question that should be asked instead of what it is about events that invites intentional description. This is not to say that intentional actions are not events. But they are not events that can be identified and individuated prior to their connection to intentional actions. Rather, which events we pick out and how they are delineated is determined by our descriptions of what happens as intentional actions.
- 17.
Inference and reasoning are used interchangeably in this paper.
- 18.
Carroll’s regress argument is applicable to implications and thus to the aforementioned examples of reasoning. It isn’t applicable to probabilistic support. See Atkinson and Peijnenburg (2017), 151–153.
- 19.
This is an extremely short review of the route from the Taking Condition to regress. For more in depth analysis of the problem and proposed solutions (or evasions), see, for instance, Boghossian (2014), Broome (2013), Chap. 12, McHugh et al. (2014).
- 20.
What’s more, it seems she can also draw the conclusion while at the same time disbelieving it. But again, her belief or disbelief in the conclusion is not something that follows from going through the inference.
- 21.
See Kloosterboer (2019) for a full discussion of these and other examples against CTR.
- 22.
- 23.
And, relatedly, Wright states that we should “distinguish inference in general from coming to a conclusion…; no particular attitude to [a] proposition is implicit in inference itself” (2014, 28).
- 24.
Anscombe also speaks of truth-connections and I think we should understand it in such broad terms: often, in our everyday reasoning we use material implications, but conceptual relations or relations of logical consequence can of course also be used (for instance, when one learns the meaning of a word). Thanks for an anonymous referee for asking me to clarify this point.
- 25.
This is to say that if one reasons, then one judges that p follows from q. Using conditionals is thus using one’s power to judge that some things follow from other things. Importantly, on my view, making a judgment is a mental act, not a result of a process of reasoning (or some other process or activity). More on this in the next section.
- 26.
What it is to put X to a particular service requires more detailed analysis and might require a different analysis in the case of theoretical and practical reasoning (see Müller, 1979). However, this does not impinge on the general point about reasoning.
- 27.
This holds for everyday human reasoning. Probabilistic logic (or reasoning as it is sometimes coined, which denotes a technical use of the term) falls outside the scope of this paper.
- 28.
The nature of practical reasoning, especially the kind of conclusion to which it leads, is of course topic of much debate. On Anscombe’s view (following Aristotle), the most basic case of practical reasoning has as its conclusion an action, not a judgment about what one should do (hence, not just the topic of practical reasoning is different from theoretical reasoning; it really has a practical character or form). If an agent puts the substances in the soil in order to attain spectacular plant growth, she thereby manifests practical reasoning. She is doing one thing by doing something else and hence judging that the one follows from the other (that doing A is a way of, or part of, doing B).
- 29.
As Dawa Ometto pointed out to me, this is especially clear if one considers Frege’s statement in its original: “Urteilen, in dem man sich anderer Wahrheiten als Rechtfertigungsgründen bewußt ist, heißt schließen.” Quoted in, for instance, Rödl (2018, 175).
- 30.
For instance, if one learns of something hurtful or of something contrary to many things one believes, it may take time for the belief to sink in. Cf. Valaris (2018).
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Kloosterboer, N. (2022). Anscombe’s Approach to Rational Capacities. In: Peijnenburg, J., Verhaegh, S. (eds) Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08593-2_9
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