Elizabeth Anscombe
MCINERNY, RALPH
Elizabeth Anscombe Philosophy in the twentieth century. BY RALPH MCINERNY On January 5, the British philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe died in England at the age of eighty-one. Elizabeth Anscombe, as...
...What the pre-conciliar British converts had in common was the anguish they felt at the apparent dismantling of the Church after Vatican II...
...After finishing at Oxford and marrying, Anscombe did her graduate work at Cambridge and became a favorite of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the transplanted Austrian who was one of the two most influential philosophers of our time...
...Wittgenstein's rejection of a world of thinking as counterpart to language led him into an aphoristic and enigmatic quest...
...She retained her own quirky and sometimes abrasive philosophical outlook— with a well-deserved reputation as leonine in controversy...
...She and the other first-rate women of her generation achieved prominence in the same context as male philosophers and were judged by the same criteria...
...The inchoate, unfinished, aphoristic nature of his writings makes them subject to a wide variety of interpretations, but Anscombe may be said to have privileged access to his mind...
...There is no one left like her...
...Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth...
...Are "to be" and "to be spoken" identical...
...They hesitated a moment and then sauntered off, hand in hand, a shapeless, loving couple, bumping against each other...
...She became a Roman Catholic when she was an undergraduate, and she married the Catholic philosopher Peter Geach...
...Anscombe never thought of herself as a woman philosopher...
...classic 1958 essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" she pointed out what had gone wrong in the entire British utilitarian and analytic tradition of ethics—opening the door to the return of virtue ethics in the writings of subsequent philosophers like Alasdair Maclntyre and theologians like Stanley Hauerwas...
...she asked in one of her early papers, and in her Ralph McInerny is the Michael P. Grace professor of medieval philosophy at the University of Notre Dame...
...Is language all there is...
...Along with Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Warnock, Anscombe had a school-marmish way of calling male philosophers to order...
...But Anscombe differed even from her female contemporaries...
...Eventually, she was named professor at Cambridge...
...They had neither raincoats nor umbrellas...
...Philosophy took what is called a "linguistic turn" with Wittgenstein...
...Another bugbear of British philosophy, made canonical by G.E...
...For all that, she was a ferociously serious, loyal, and vocal Catholic...
...Her 1957 book Intention might have seemed merely a recovery of a defensible conception of practical thinking, where the intention with which we act gives intelligibility to the components of our action...
...Geach's crucial article "Good and Evil" made the obvious (to non-philosophers) point that the appraisal of something as good has to do with what it is and not merely with our approval...
...She was named one of his literary executors and had a hand in the posthumous publication of a shelf of Wittgenstein's writings in the decades following his death in 1951, editing and translating from the German...
...And yet, though her editorial work proved her laudable piety toward a revered master, Anscombe was not, in fact, a close follower of Wittgenstein...
...Once upon a time, language was understood to express thinking and thinking to express the world...
...It is curious that now, when a feminist philosophy promoting women has become a dominant genre, there are no women philosophers of the caliber of Anscombe and her contemporaries...
...Moore's Principia Ethica in 1903, was the "fact-value" dichotomy—the claim, which by the 1950s was being drummed into college students across England and America, that facts somehow come to us value free, that values are something we add to otherwise morally neutral facts...
...From prudent shelter I watched them go, their laughter echoing back in the rain...
...This is not to say that Anscombe did not exhibit perforce feminine traits...
...Despite the two charmingly simple pamphlets she wrote for the Catholic Truth Society (one on teaching one's children about the Eucharist, the other an argument that contraception is immoral), she was never popularly counted among G.K...
...That was largely because of the demanding technicality of her philosophical work...
...But Anscombe found in the role of intention a corrective to the passive understanding of knowledge that had dominated British philosophy...
...But this classical triad of word-thought-thing has not fared well in the course of modern philosophy...
...Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" argued that propositions about what we ought to do can perform their characteristic function only by dependence on divine commands...
...Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene—the glorious parade of twentieth-century British converts to Catholicism...
...Once after a conference in Milwaukee, I saw Peter and Elizabeth come out of the lecture hall into a light rain...
...It was not simply that she did not suffer fools gladly, fools suffered when they tried to dispute her...
...It is the image I retain of them still...
...But dissenting Catholics received no aid or comfort from Elizabeth Anscombe...
...She retained her maiden name for philosophical purposes and was always professionally referred to as "Miss Anscombe"—even by her husband, with whom, in the midst of her writing, editing, teaching, and lecturing, she had seven children...
...The matter-of-factness of the feminine mind, in her case enhanced by motherhood, cut through the bogus mysticism into which male philosophers, particularly Germanic ones, are prone to fall...
...Elizabeth Anscombe, as she was known, was a leading member of what, in retrospect, proves to have been a marvelous regiment of women—the antidote to the antic male irrationality of twentieth-century analytic philosophy...
...Neither, interestingly, did feminists...
...Descartes severed thought from world, and Wittgenstein, completing the dissection, severed thought from language...
...Wittgenstein's rejection of any private language and insistence on the social context within which we learn and speak liberated analytic philosophy from several dogmas...
Vol. 6 • January 2001 • No. 19
