On Wittgenstein Some of Anscombe's most frequently cited works are translations, editions, and expositions of the work of her teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein, including an influential exegesis of Wittgenstein's 1921 book, the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This brought to the fore the importance of
Gottlob Frege for Wittgenstein's thought and, partly on that basis, attacked
"positivist" interpretations of the work. She co-edited his posthumous second book,
Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations (1953) with
Rush Rhees. Her English translation of the book appeared simultaneously and remains standard. She went on to edit or co-edit several volumes of selections from his notebooks, (co-)translating many important works like
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) and Wittgenstein's "sustained treatment" of
G. E. Moore's epistemology,
On Certainty (1969). She edited and translated
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol 1. (1980). In 1978, Anscombe was awarded the
Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class for her work on Wittgenstein.
Intention Her most important work is the monograph
Intention (1957). Three volumes of collected papers were published in 1981:
From Parmenides to Wittgenstein;
Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind; and
Ethics, Religion and Politics. Another collection,
Human Life, Action and Ethics appeared posthumously in 2005. Cognitive states describe the world and are causally derived from the facts or objects they depict. Conative states do not describe the world, but aim to bring something about in the world. Anscombe used the example of a shopping list to illustrate the difference. The list can be a straightforward observational report of what is actually bought (thereby acting like a cognitive state), or it can function as a conative state such as a command or desire, dictating what the agent should buy. If the agent fails to buy what is listed, we do not say that the list is untrue or incorrect; we say that the mistake is in the action, not the desire. According to Anscombe, this difference in direction of fit is a major difference between speculative knowledge (theoretical, empirical knowledge) and practical knowledge (knowledge of actions and morals). Whereas "speculative knowledge" is "derived from the objects known", practical knowledge is – in a phrase Anscombe lifts from Aquinas – "the cause of what it understands".
Ethics Anscombe made great contributions to ethics as well as metaphysics. Her 1958 essay "
Modern Moral Philosophy" is credited with having coined the term "
consequentialism", as well as with reviving interest in and study of
virtue ethics in Western academic philosophy. The
Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford is named after her, and conducts bioethical research in the Catholic tradition.
Brute and institutional facts Anscombe also introduced the idea of a set of facts being 'brute relative to' some fact. When a set of facts xyz stands in this relation to a fact A, they are a subset out of a range some subset among which holds if A holds. Thus if A is the fact that I have paid for something, the brute facts might be that I have handed him a cheque for a sum which he has named as the price for the goods, saying that this is the payment, or that I gave him some cash at the time that he gave me the goods. There tends, according to Anscombe, to be an institutional context which gives its point to the description 'A', but of which 'A' is not itself a description: that I have given someone a shilling is not a description of the institution of money or of the currency of the country. According to her, no brute facts
xyz can generally be said to entail the fact
A relative to which they are 'brute' except with the proviso "under normal circumstances", for "one cannot mention all the things that were not the case, which would have made a difference if they had been." A set of facts xyz ... may be brute relative to a fact A which itself is one of a set of facts ABC ... which is brute relative to some further fact W. Thus Anscombe's account is not of a distinct class of facts, to be distinguished from another class, 'institutional facts': the essential relation is that of a set of facts being 'brute relative to' some fact. Following Anscombe,
John Searle derived another conception of 'brute facts' as non-mental facts to play the foundational role and generate similar hierarchies in his philosophical account of
speech acts and
institutional reality.
First person Her paper "The First Person" buttressed remarks by Wittgenstein (in his Lectures on "Private Experience") arguing for the now-notorious conclusion that the first-person pronoun, "I", does not refer to anything (not, e.g., to the speaker) because of its immunity from reference failure. Having shown by counter-example that 'I' does not refer to the body, Anscombe objected to the implied Cartesianism of its referring at all. Few people accept the conclusion – though the position was later adopted in a more radical form by
David Lewis – but the paper was an important contribution to work on
indexicals and self-consciousness that has been carried on by philosophers as varied as
John Perry,
Peter Strawson,
David Kaplan,
Gareth Evans,
John McDowell, and
Sebastian Rödl.
Causality In her article, "Causality and Determination", Anscombe defends two main ideas: that causal relations are perceivable, and that causation does not require a necessary connection and a universal generalization linking cause and effect. Regarding her idea that causal relations are perceivable, she believes that we perceive the causal relations between objects and events. In defending her idea that causal relations are perceivable, Anscombe poses a question "How did we come by our primary knowledge of causality?". She proposes two answers to this question: • By "learning to speak, we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts" • By observing that some action(s) caused a certain event In proposing her first answer, that by "learning to speak, we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts", Anscombe thinks that by learning to speak we already have a linguistic representation of certain causal concepts and she gives an example of transitive verbs, such as scrape, push, carry, knock over.Example: I knocked over a vase of flowers.In proposing her second answer, that by observing some actions we can see causation, Anscombe thinks that we cannot ignore the fact that certain actions, which produced a certain event are possible to observe.Example: a cat spilled milk.The second idea that Anscombe defends in the article "Causality and Determination" is that causation requires neither a necessary connection nor a universal generalization linking cause and effect. Anscombe states that it is assumed that causality is some kind of necessary connection. == Views of her work ==