Elizabeth Anscombe

1919-2001 · British · Philosophy of Action, Ethics, Catholic Aristotelian Philosophy, Wittgenstein Studies

It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.

In 1956 Elizabeth Anscombe stood up at Oxford to oppose an honorary degree for Harry Truman, on the grounds that ordering the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made him, plainly, a mass murderer. That refusal to soften a verdict for the sake of polite company is the key to her whole career. A Cambridge-trained student and friend of Wittgenstein, she became the executor of his papers and the translator of his Philosophical Investigations — yet she was also a fierce Roman Catholic and the mother of seven, and her faith ran straight through her philosophy rather than beside it.

Topics Elizabeth Anscombe addresses

• intention under a description
• practical knowledge
• non-observational knowledge
• the question 'why?'
• the doctrine of double effect
• moral absolutism
• consequentialism
• the rejection of moral obligation
• virtue ethics revival
• the first person
• brute facts
• stopping someone's modus tollens
• the Aristotelian-Thomist revival
• the fact-value distinction
• the legalistic conception of morality
• reasons and causes
• intentional action
• knowledge as cause of what it understands
• the innocent
• the intentional killing of the innocent
• causality
• the reality of the past
• perception and memory
• truth

Converse with Elizabeth Anscombe on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Elizabeth Anscombe's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.