G. E. M. Anscombe

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G. E. M. Anscombe bigraphy, stories - Philosophers

G. E. M. Anscombe : biography

18 March 1919 – 5 January 2001

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (18 March 1919 – 5 January 2001), FBA better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics.

Born in Ireland, 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’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. Her monograph Intention is generally recognised as her greatest and most influential work, and 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.

In 2010, philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that Anscombe was "perhaps the last great philosopher writing in English".

Life

G. E. M. Anscombe was born to Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe and Allen Wells Anscombe, on 18 March 1919, in Limerick, Ireland, where her father had been posted as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the Irish War of Independence.

She graduated from Sydenham High School in 1937, and went on to read "Mods & Greats" (classics, ancient history, and philosophy) at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1941. During her first undergraduate year she converted to Roman Catholicism, and remained a lifelong devout Catholic. She garnered controversy when she publicly opposed Britain’s entry into World War II, although her father had been a soldier, and one of her brothers was to serve during the war.

In 1941 she married Peter Geach, like her a Roman Catholic convert, a student of Wittgenstein, and a distinguished British 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

After her fellowship at Cambridge ended, she was awarded a research fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, but during the academic year of 1946 – 1947, she continued to travel to Cambridge once a week, together with her fellow student W. A. Hijab, to attend tutorials with Wittgenstein on the philosophy of religion. She became one of Wittgenstein’s favourite students and one of his closest friends (Monk [1990] 497-498). Wittgenstein affectionately referred to her by the pet name "old man" – 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 translator of his Philosophical Investigations before she had learned German, for which purpose he arranged a stay in Vienna.

Anscombe visited Wittgenstein many times after he left Cambridge in 1947, and travelled to Cambridge in April 1951 to visit him on his death bed. Wittgenstein named her, along with Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright, as his literary executor, and after his death in 1951, she was responsible for editing, translating, and publishing many of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and notebooks.