G.E.M. Anscombe: Philosophy, Action and Moral Responsibility

When G.E.M. Anscombe asked what someone was doing, she insisted that the answer could not be reduced to a description of bodily movement. A person pumping water might also be filling a cistern; the same action, seen in another light, might involve poisoning a household. What we call an action depends on the descriptions that apply to it, and those descriptions matter when we judge responsibility. In Intention (1957), a short but demanding book, Anscombe gave philosophers a lasting way to examine what it means to act for a reason.

Her work ranged from the philosophy of action and mind to ethics, language and causation. She also became one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most important students and literary executors, translating and editing much of his later work. Born in Limerick and raised in England, she built her academic life at Oxford and Cambridge. Her influence came not simply from carrying another philosopher’s ideas into English, but from developing original arguments that continue to shape debates about action, practical reasoning and moral responsibility.

Oxford, Cambridge and an independent mind

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was born in Limerick, Ireland, on 18 March 1919. Her father, Captain Allen Wells Anscombe, was serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Her mother, Gertrude Elizabeth Thomas, was a headmistress; her father later headed the science and engineering side at Dulwich College. Anscombe attended Sydenham High School before entering St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1937 to study literae humaniores, or Greats. The course brought her into contact with classical texts and the questions of logic, ethics and human life that would remain central to her work.

She became a practising Roman Catholic while still young, having converted during her school years and been received into the Church in her first year at Oxford. In 1941 she graduated with a first in her degree finals, after receiving a second in her honour moderations. That same year she married the philosopher Peter Geach, also a Catholic convert and a student of Wittgenstein. They had three sons and four daughters.

Anscombe went to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a research fellow from 1942 to 1945. Her purpose was to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures. She had encountered his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an undergraduate, and the Cambridge philosopher’s method of examining how language works offered a new way through problems that had seemed intractable. After her fellowship ended, she held a research fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, but continued travelling to Cambridge for tutorials with Wittgenstein. Their discussions, including those on the philosophy of religion, helped form a close intellectual relationship. She learned from him without becoming a mere follower: throughout her career she tested received assumptions, including some associated with philosophical traditions she knew well.

Wittgenstein in English

Wittgenstein trusted Anscombe with difficult work. He chose her to translate Philosophical Investigations, and arranged for her to spend time in Vienna improving her German. When he died in 1951, he named her, alongside Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright, as one of his literary executors. She went on to edit, translate and publish many of his manuscripts and notebooks.

The English translation of Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1953, co-edited by Anscombe and Rhees, and became the standard translation. She also translated or co-translated works including Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics and On Certainty, and edited other material from Wittgenstein’s papers. Her involvement extended beyond rendering words from one language into another. As a philosopher who knew his arguments closely, she had to make decisions about how to convey his thought without smoothing away its difficulty. That work helped make Wittgenstein’s later philosophy accessible to generations of English-speaking readers.

Anscombe’s scholarship on Wittgenstein included an influential study of the Tractatus, which emphasised the importance of Gottlob Frege to its ideas and challenged positivist readings. Her role as translator and editor was substantial, but it forms only one strand of her achievement. She was also a philosopher with her own distinctive account of what it is to act intentionally, and her own forceful arguments about moral theory.

Intention: what are you doing, and why?

Published in 1957, Intention begins from a question that sounds ordinary: “Why?” Asked of someone doing something, the question can invite an answer in terms of a purpose or reason. If a person says that she is moving a chair to make room, for example, she describes what she is doing in a way that makes the action intelligible as intentional. Anscombe’s point was not that every movement must have a conscious explanation. It was that understanding intentional action requires attention to the reasons and descriptions under which an agent acts.

Her best-known example is a person operating a pump. The person may intentionally be pumping water, while not intentionally contracting particular muscles or producing a particular rhythm. One bodily movement can therefore be intentional under one description and not under another. This way of analysing action matters well beyond philosophical terminology. Responsibility often turns on what someone was doing: whether an act was deliberate, what purpose it served, and what the agent understood herself to be doing. The description is not a decorative label added after the event; it is part of the account of the action itself.

Anscombe also distinguished different “directions of fit”, using a shopping list to make the point. A list might record what has already been bought; in that case, it is assessed by how well it matches the world. Or it might guide a shopper’s purchases; then the actions are expected to bring the world into line with the list. The first resembles belief, which aims to describe what is the case. The second resembles desire or intention, which directs action towards what is to be made the case. The example illuminates a difference between theoretical knowledge, which takes the world as its subject, and practical knowledge, which is involved in bringing something about.

These arguments made Intention a major work in the philosophy of action and practical reasoning. They also helped frame questions of moral and political responsibility. If an action can be described in several ways, an assessment must consider which descriptions are relevant and what the agent intended. That does not settle every difficult case. It does show why a bare account of physical movements may be inadequate when we are trying to understand what a person did.

Ethics, virtue and public argument

Anscombe’s 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” challenged the direction of contemporary ethical theory. It introduced the term “consequentialism” into analytic philosophy and questioned moral systems that judged actions by their consequences. Her criticism was broader than a disagreement about one rule or outcome. She argued that modern moral philosophy often retained the language of obligation and moral law after abandoning the framework that had once made that language intelligible. She called for renewed attention to virtue and human flourishing, drawing philosophers back towards Aristotle.

The essay helped revive academic interest in virtue ethics. Anscombe’s proposal was not simply to substitute a new set of moral labels for an old one. It pressed philosophers to ask what kind of account of human life could make moral judgements meaningful. Her religious commitments informed her thinking, but her arguments were addressed to philosophical questions rather than offered as a replacement for argument. Her paper remains a significant intervention precisely because it challenged the assumptions behind influential ways of talking about right and wrong.

For Anscombe, questions of intention were not remote from public affairs. In 1956 she opposed Oxford’s decision to award an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, citing his authorisation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She rejected the idea that a leader could be absolved by saying that he had only signed a paper. Her protest made concrete the kind of question raised by her philosophy of action: what did the person responsible actually do, and under what description should that action be understood?

She had also publicly criticised Britain’s entry into the Second World War as an undergraduate in 1939. In 1948, at the Oxford Socratic Club, she challenged C. S. Lewis’s argument against naturalism. Lewis later substantially rewrote the relevant chapter of Miracles. Accounts differ about how he experienced the debate, and Anscombe’s own recollection was of a sober discussion of specific criticisms rather than the humiliating defeat later described by some of Lewis’s associates. The documented outcome is narrower: he revised the chapter, while Anscombe disputed the more dramatic story of the encounter.

Beyond her best-known books

Anscombe’s contributions extended to institutional life, self-consciousness and causality. In “On Brute Facts”, she examined how physical events can acquire descriptions within a social setting. Handing someone money is a physical transaction; in the right circumstances it can also count as paying a debt. The institutional description depends on a context that gives the action its point. Anscombe’s account influenced later discussions of social reality, including work by John Searle.

In “The First Person”, she questioned whether “I” functions like an ordinary referring expression. Her argument challenged familiar assumptions about the relation between a speaker and the word used to identify that speaker. It did not settle later debates about self-knowledge and consciousness, but it made the question harder to avoid and contributed to continuing philosophical work on first-person thought.

Her writing on causality likewise resisted simplified accounts. In “Causality and Determination”, her Cambridge inaugural lecture, she argued that causal relations can be perceived and that causation need not depend on a necessary connection or a universal law linking cause and effect. She considered how people learn causal concepts through language and through observing events. This work extended her general approach: philosophical accounts should respect the variety of ordinary experience rather than forcing every explanation into a single model.

Her books and collections included An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Three Philosophers with Peter Geach, and three volumes of collected papers published in 1981: From Parmenides to Wittgenstein, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, and Ethics, Religion and Politics. A further collection, Human Life, Action and Ethics, appeared after her death. Together, these works show a philosopher whose influence cannot be reduced to one book or one debate.

Teaching, controversy and recognition

Anscombe remained at Somerville College from 1946, first as a research fellow and later as a teaching fellow. In 1970 she became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, holding the chair until her retirement in 1986. Her academic career thus linked two of Britain’s leading universities, and her teaching brought her arguments into direct contact with successive generations of students. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1967.

She did not keep her philosophical and religious convictions separate from public questions. She defended Catholic teaching on sexual ethics, including in her pamphlet Contraception and Chastity, and was arrested after taking part in a protest outside an abortion clinic. These positions remain contested. Their place in a portrait of Anscombe is not that they command agreement, but that she treated moral questions as matters on which arguments and actions had consequences. Her public opposition to the Truman degree and her criticism of Lewis’s argument also show a willingness to challenge prominent figures directly.

Anscombe’s association with Wittgenstein sometimes invited the view that her importance lay mainly in her work on his legacy. Her own books and essays refute that narrower account. She combined careful analysis of language with sustained attention to practical life: what people intend, how social practices make actions intelligible, and what grounds moral judgement. Her teaching and publications helped sustain a British philosophical tradition in which ideas could be examined rigorously and debated without being insulated from public concerns.

She died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001, aged 81, from kidney failure. In her later years she had suffered from heart disease and never fully recovered from a car crash in 1996. She was buried in the Ascension Parish burial ground in Huntingdon Road, beside Wittgenstein. Her husband, Peter Geach, was buried there in 2013.

Why G.E.M. Anscombe deserves a place in British Legacy

Anscombe’s place in British Legacy rests on more than her association with famous institutions or with Wittgenstein. She developed an influential account of intentional action that made reasons, purposes and descriptions central to understanding what people do. In Intention, her analysis of the “Why?” question, the pumping example and the different directions of fit offered later philosophers durable tools for thinking about action and practical knowledge. Those ideas matter whenever judgements of responsibility depend on distinguishing a person’s bodily movements from the action she intended to perform.

Her contribution to moral philosophy was equally consequential. “Modern Moral Philosophy” challenged the assumptions of its field, introduced a term that became standard in analytic philosophy and helped renew interest in virtue ethics. Her writing on brute facts, the first person and causality widened philosophical debate rather than confining her reputation to one subject. At the same time, her translation and editorial work helped make Wittgenstein’s later writings available in English. These are specific achievements with lasting intellectual benefits: clearer ways to analyse action, renewed questions about ethical life, and access to a major body of philosophical work.

The British connection is grounded in the places where her thought developed and was taught. Anscombe studied at Oxford and Cambridge, spent decades at Somerville, held Cambridge’s chair of philosophy, and was elected to the British Academy. Her career made the universities’ seminar rooms and lecture courses places where students encountered demanding arguments that reached beyond academic boundaries. She also showed that philosophical precision can bear on public decisions, from war and political responsibility to moral controversies. Readers may reject some of her conclusions; they can still learn from the seriousness with which she argued for them. Her work remains available to be read, contested and used, making her a substantial part of Britain’s intellectual inheritance.

Sources

G. E. M. Anscombe — Wikipedia revision 1364213404

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