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Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe 1919–2001

Jenny Teichman

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 115 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, I

Elizabeth Anscombe, Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a philosopher who worked at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Her ... More

Elizabeth Anscombe, Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a philosopher who worked at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Her published works include Intention (1957, 1963, 2000) and An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959). Obituary by Jenny Teichman.Less

 Primum Mobile

Michael Ward

in Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis

The problem of occasion: why did Lewis write the Chronicles of Narnia? Writing was always the way to freedom for him, and the debate about Naturalism with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club ... More

The problem of occasion: why did Lewis write the Chronicles of Narnia? Writing was always the way to freedom for him, and the debate about Naturalism with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club caused him difficulties which may have required mental and imaginative liberation. In Miracles, his defence of Idealism, he had argued that human reason was monarchical and that Naturalists preferred to live in a democratic universe. In part, the first Narnia Chronicle was written to demonstrate the same case imaginatively as he had made propositionally in his apologetics.Less

Introduction

Talbot Brewer

in The Retrieval of Ethics

This Introduction starts by discussing the purpose of looking at ethics in philosophy and examines the history of ethics in a wider context. Virtue ethics is mentioned in relation to Elizabeth ... More

This Introduction starts by discussing the purpose of looking at ethics in philosophy and examines the history of ethics in a wider context. Virtue ethics is mentioned in relation to Elizabeth Anscombe's ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. These two works are discussed in detail. The Introduction goes on to outline the place virtue ethics has in contemporary philosophy. It then outlines the main concern of the book, which is to develop and extend some of the more radical themes sounded by Anscombe and MacIntyre and analyse them in a new light.Less

Intention and Side Effects: John Finnis and Elizabeth Anscombe *

Gormally Luke

in Reason, Morality, and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis

This chapter argues that John Finnis is mistaken in thinking that his understanding of the scope of intention has been faithful to the conception of intentional action developed in Elizabeth ... More

This chapter argues that John Finnis is mistaken in thinking that his understanding of the scope of intention has been faithful to the conception of intentional action developed in Elizabeth Anscombe's monograph Intention; and that Anscombe herself, in later ethical analyses, effectively abandoned her original conception of intentional action. The argument focuses on two types of case: craniotomy and the stuck potholer. It contends that it is Finnis not Anscombe who has overlooked the lessons of Intention for the evaluation of the cases in treating as side effects what she treats as intended. Finnis employs an unduly narrow conception of the scope of intention. Fidelity to Anscombe's conception would, however, raise difficulties for his ethical theory.Less

Aggregation and Two Moral Methods

F. M. Kamm

in Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm

This chapter explores whether the number of people we can help counts morally in deciding what to do in conflict situations when we cannot help everyone. It begins by reconsidering the arguments of ... More

This chapter explores whether the number of people we can help counts morally in deciding what to do in conflict situations when we cannot help everyone. It begins by reconsidering the arguments of John Taurek and Elizabeth Anscombe as to whether the number of people we can help counts morally. It then examines arguments that numbers should count which has been give by Thomas Scanlon and criticism of them by Michael Otsuka. It discusses how different conceptions of the moral method known as pairwise comparison are at work in these different arguments and what the ideas of balancing and tiebreaking signify for decision making in various types of cases. It contrasts two subcategories of pairwise comparison—confrontation and substitution—by which conflicts might be resolved in a nonconsequentialist theory, and argues that substitution is permissible. The chapter concludes by considering how another moral method, known as “virtual divisibility,” functions and what it helps to reveal about an argument by Otsuka against those who do not think that numbers count.Less

Anscombe on the Expression of Intention: An Exegesis

Richard Moran and Martin J. Stone

in The Philosophical Imagination: Selected Essays

This paper asks an interpretive question about the place of “expression of intention” in Anscombe’s opening presentation of three familiar employments of a concept of intention, commonly taken as ... More

This paper asks an interpretive question about the place of “expression of intention” in Anscombe’s opening presentation of three familiar employments of a concept of intention, commonly taken as distinguishing between (1) having or forming the intention to do something, (2) doing something intentionally, and (3) doing something with a certain intention. An initial project in philosophy of action is, then, determining which of these employments is primary and can be used to explain the others. Anscombe’s own first division, however, is not the having of an intention but the expression of intention, as when someone says, “I’m going for a walk.” The paper argues that attention to the role of expression is not a mere peculiarity of Anscombe’s, and that specifically verbal expression provides a way to see how radically different in orientation Anscombe’s conception of intentional action is from the “standard story” of action since Donald Davidson.Less

Antirealist Expressivism and Quasi-Realism

Simon Blackburn

David Copp (ed.)

in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory

Expressivism is the view that the function of normative sentences is not to represent a kind of fact, but to avow attitudes, prescribe behavior, or the like. The idea can be found in David Hume. In ... More

Expressivism is the view that the function of normative sentences is not to represent a kind of fact, but to avow attitudes, prescribe behavior, or the like. The idea can be found in David Hume. In the 20th century, G.E. Moore’s Open Question Argument provided important support for the view. Elizabeth Anscombe introduced the notion of “direction of fit,” which helped distinguish expressivism from a kind of naive subjectivism. The central advantage of expressivism is that it easily explains the motivational force of moral conviction. Its chief problem is it has difficulty explaining the “realist surface” of moralizing. Quasi-realism is a strategy for explaining the realist surface without abandoning the underlying ideas of expressivism. It aims to explain moral error as well as deal with the so-called Frege-Geach problem. This chapter explains quasi-realism, and evaluates it by comparison with its chief rivals: Aristotelian approaches, Kantian approaches, realist moral naturalism, and fictionalism.Less

Interpreting Davidson on Intentional Action

Frederick Stoutland

in Dialogues with Davidson: Acting, Interpreting, Understanding

This chapter illustrates how Davidson’s works on the philosophy of action have spawned a widely accepted view that differs from his own in a number of respects. Critics of the standard story, of ... More

This chapter illustrates how Davidson’s works on the philosophy of action have spawned a widely accepted view that differs from his own in a number of respects. Critics of the standard story, of which Davidson was a major contributor, generally assume that he accepted the view that actions are bodily movements caused and rationalized by beliefs and desires, as do its defenders, who invariably cite him as their inspiration and often credit him for rooting the story in physicalism. However, both critics and defenders fail to see the substantial influence of Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on Davidsonian philosophy. Although commonly viewed as having replaced an account like Anscombe’s with the standard story, Davidson rather thought that such an account was consistent with a causal account of action.Less

Bodily Ownership, Bodily Awareness, and Knowledge without Observation

José Luis Bermúdez

in The Bodily Self: Selected Essays

Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership. She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of ... More

Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership. She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of myness and takes issue with my defense in Bermúdez of a deflationary approach to bodily ownership. That paper proposed an argument deriving from Elizabeth Anscombe’s various discussions of what she terms knowledge without observation. De Vignemont is not convinced and appeals to the Rubber Hand Illusion to undercut my appeal to Anscombe. Section 1 of this article restates the case against the putative quale of ownership. Section 2 explains why de Vignemonts’ objections miss the mark. Section 3 discusses in more detail how to draw a principled distinction between bodily awareness and ordinary perceptual awareness.Less

Intention and Side Effects

John Finnis

in Intention and Identity: Collected Essays Volume II

With a focus on English criminal law, particularly in terms of murder, as expounded at the highest level in recent decades, this chapter distinguishes in detail between intention and desire, and ... More

With a focus on English criminal law, particularly in terms of murder, as expounded at the highest level in recent decades, this chapter distinguishes in detail between intention and desire, and intention and foresight (or so-called ‘oblique intention’). The views of theorists such as Hobbes and Glanville Williams are critiqued. Various cases, actual and hypothetical, are considered in detail. Destroying a plane in order to kill a passenger is distinguished from destroying it to get cargo insurance moneys. Elizabeth Anscombe's discussion of ‘double effect’ and of the trapped cave-explorers is refuted. A reform of the definition of murder is proposed. An attempt is made to show why intention maters so much. An endnote considers operations to separate conjoined twins.Less

Positivism and ‘Authority’

John Finnis

in Philosophy of Law: Collected Essays Volume IV

This chapter examines some main features of Hart's methodology. It proceeds to a consideration of ‘conceptual analysis’, by showing how it is possible to devise (as Rolf Sartorius did in the ... More

This chapter examines some main features of Hart's methodology. It proceeds to a consideration of ‘conceptual analysis’, by showing how it is possible to devise (as Rolf Sartorius did in the conference paper under discussion) coherent concepts of political or legal authority which nonetheless are unfitted for use in political or legal theory. The method of classical social theory deploys the internal point of view more appropriately, as is exemplified in ELizabeth Anscombe's need-based discussion of the source of the authority of the state.Less

Anscombe on Practical Knowledge

Richard Moran

in The Philosophical Imagination: Selected Essays

The notion of “practical knowledge” is a central part of the philosophical account of intentional action in Elizabeth Anscombe’s monograph Intention. It is characterized in a number of different ... More

The notion of “practical knowledge” is a central part of the philosophical account of intentional action in Elizabeth Anscombe’s monograph Intention. It is characterized in a number of different ways: as a form of “non-observational” knowledge of what one is doing, as the way a person knows what she will do when this is grounded in an intention and not a mere prediction, as a “non-contemplative” mode of knowing that is “the cause of that which it understands.” The paper attempts to organize and show the coherence of these various strands in Anscombe’s conception of practical knowledge, and argues that it enables us to understand both how the agent’s perspective on what she is doing plays a constitutive role in the identity of the intentional action in question, while yet allowing that a person can fail to do what she takes herself to be doing.Less

Meredith & Ends

Jami Bartlett

in Object Lessons: The Novel As a Theory of Reference

This chapter defines and analyzes the “impacted object” in George Meredith’s The Egoist, arguing that the incomprehensible compression of his aphorisms and the tedium of his plots should be read as a ... More

This chapter defines and analyzes the “impacted object” in George Meredith’s The Egoist, arguing that the incomprehensible compression of his aphorisms and the tedium of his plots should be read as a struggle with the descriptive density of objects. Objects in The Egoist refuse any logic of displacement, accretion, suspension, or revision—they are just there—and so descriptions of them stack up and stop the novel cold. Meredith’s descriptions of a character’s interaction with an object become condensed and agitated, charged with the sheer complexity of the proposition they present to us; Meredith is exposing the problem of the non-substitutability of different descriptions of the object, and dramatizes the search for the salient, motivating description of action on and through a crowd of intentional objects. Reading Meredith alongside Anscombe, we learn that scenes that are considered prolix and unproductive, moments that show us Meredith at what has seemed like his least disciplined, actually reveal new sources of motivation in the broader organization of this novel and in others.Less

Introduction

Jami Bartlett

in Object Lessons: The Novel As a Theory of Reference

Opening with an analysis of the first chapter of Dickens’s Great Expectations, this introduction presents the case for a reading of the realist novel informed by analyses of reference in the ... More

Opening with an analysis of the first chapter of Dickens’s Great Expectations, this introduction presents the case for a reading of the realist novel informed by analyses of reference in the philosophy of language. Theories of the novel by Van Ghent, Brooks, Scarry, Woloch, and Lynch are depicted as grounded in a Millian theory of reference, and are developed alongside a spectrum of theories of reference in the philosophy of language, from philosophers Anscombe and Kelly, who are oriented phenomenologically, to Russell, Searle, Strawson, and Quine, who are oriented analytically. It is argued that an attention to the syntax of descriptions like that we see in the philosophy of language reveals that the logic of referring terms in Dickens has gone unread by literary critics of the novel, who, in missing the significance of Russell’s insights on proper names, misconstrue the grammatical order of Dickens’s language, which is explicitly problematizing the act of referring, as positing an easy equivalence of words and objects.Less

The Practical Knowledge Response

Berislav Marušić

in Evidence and Agency: Norms of Belief for Promising and Resolving

This chapter consider and rejects the Practical Knowledge Response. According to this response, we can rationally believe that we will do what we are promising or resolving to do, when promising or ... More

This chapter consider and rejects the Practical Knowledge Response. According to this response, we can rationally believe that we will do what we are promising or resolving to do, when promising or resolving against the evidence, because we have practical knowledge that we will do it. The Practical Knowledge Response is motivated by Elizabeth Anscombe’s view that we can know that we will do something without considering evidence but by engaging in practical reasoning. The chapter rejects the Practical Knowledge Response on the grounds that our evidence is a defeater for our purported practical knowledge. Also, it argues that the view that practical knowledge is required for action implausibly implies that we cannot perform any difficult actions. The chapter concludes by identifying an insight of the Practical Knowledge Response: practical reason itself can make belief rational—even if it does not secure practical knowledge.Less

C. S. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles

Elizabeth Anscombe

in C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society

In 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe, then a student of Wittgenstein and a research fellow at Oxford, publicly challenged C. S. Lewis’s central argument against naturalism. In response to her criticisms, ... More

In 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe, then a student of Wittgenstein and a research fellow at Oxford, publicly challenged C. S. Lewis’s central argument against naturalism. In response to her criticisms, Lewis rewrote the relevant chapter of his book Miracles. Anscombe briefly acknowledged the revision in print as an improvement, but never wrote more extensively about it. In 1985, however, she gave a talk about Lewis’s revised version to the C. S. Lewis Society, discussing its strengths and remaining weaknesses. This chapter is a transcript of that talk.Less

Murdoch and the Monolith

Jami Bartlett

in Object Lessons: The Novel As a Theory of Reference

This chapter returns the concept of the novel as a theory of reference to its beginning, and argues that, for the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, narrative itself is a theory of reference. The ... More

This chapter returns the concept of the novel as a theory of reference to its beginning, and argues that, for the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, narrative itself is a theory of reference. The characters in Murdoch’s novel Under the Net find themselves enmeshed in obscure, monolithic patterns and systems they cannot see, manipulated by contingency or by the strategies of others, and resentfully complicit; Murdoch’s object of reference is literary form itself. She treats the narrative potential of objects in her philosophy, as well. Her essay “The Idea of Perfection” makes a case for the thingness of intention, arguing that a person’s intention in saying or doing something involves a behavior pattern rather than an intended object. This pattern is shown to be Murdoch’s most powerful tool as a novelist, since the description of what happens is available to characters and narratives, and refuses the hypothetical status of the unknowable inner life. Following Wittgenstein and Anscombe’s suggestion that under some descriptions an action is intentional, and under others it is not, Murdoch understands an expression of intention as given by the description of the act under which it is intended: she understands intention as a product of narration.Less

Contracting without Meaning

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

How do you know what a corporate person is really intending, whoever exactly that person is? This chapter explores a set of initial answers to this question in philosophies of intention like ... More

How do you know what a corporate person is really intending, whoever exactly that person is? This chapter explores a set of initial answers to this question in philosophies of intention like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, in historical political cartoons of the corporation, in legal theories of contracts, and in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the influential novel about the railroad colossus known as the Southern Pacific. Together, they fill out the problem of collective social intention both as it was understood around the turn of the twentieth century and how it developed subsequently. Although older accounts of contract appeal to intention (“a meeting of minds”), the corporate form’s lack of inner life and composite quality made such a mind-meeting odd to envision. The difficulty of knowing a corporate person’s meaning raised knotty issues of interpretation, and political cartoons provided a popular attempt to work through these issues. Other thinkers, including law professor Ernst Freund and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., resolved these problems in their theories of corporate contracts, which introduced a larger concern of how to interpret any of a corporation’s signs. This issue occupied philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce, and later scholars of contracts such as Arthur Corbin. Ultimately, an attempt to resolve a particular problem of corporate contracts led to a semiological theory committed to the simple literality of signs, in order to negotiate how to live with collective beings without obvious or singular minds.Less

Memories of the Socratic Club

Stella Aldwinckle

in C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society

From 1942 to 1955, C. S. Lewis was president of the Oxford Socratic Club, a student and faculty club dedicated to constructive debates between Christians and non-Christians. It was in this club that ... More

From 1942 to 1955, C. S. Lewis was president of the Oxford Socratic Club, a student and faculty club dedicated to constructive debates between Christians and non-Christians. It was in this club that Lewis debated Elizabeth Anscombe in 1949. This chapter gives a history of the club. It includes striking anecdotes as well as valuable background information about this important aspect of Lewis’s university life.Less