G. E. M. Anscombe

Many philosophers nowadays take for granted a causalist view of action explanation, according to which intentional action is a movement caused by mental antecedents. For them, “the possibility of human agency evidently requires that our mental states – our beliefs, desires, and intentions – have causal effects in the physical world: in voluntary actions our beliefs and desires, or intentions and decisions, must somehow cause our limbs to move in appropriate ways” (Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World, Cambridge (MA), (...) MIT Press, 2000 (1998), p. 31). The main question then is not to know whether there is mental causation at all, but how we should account for it. How can the mind move our body? In her 1983 paper, “The Causation of Action”, Elizabeth Anscombe shows how confused this way of putting things is. For her, if intentions or beliefs can indeed be taken to be causes of action, it is not in any metaphysically problematic sense. Seeing this requires us to distinguish clearly two theses: (1) “to be done in execution of a certain intention” is not a causal relation between intention and action; (2) an intention may be said to cause something: but this pertains to a specific kind of causal history, different from that which is uncovered by physical enquiry. First we will show how the metaphysical problem of mental causation arises from a given conception of action. Then we will turn to Anscombe’s arguments in favour of the two aforementioned theses. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that if and only if agents are motivated to act by good reasons for acting, they flourish, since, in so doing, they consciously act in accordance with their nature through virtuous actions. I offer an account of what good reasons for acting consist of reconsidering Aquinas’ natural inclinations. Based on a critical analysis of Anjum and Mumford’s work on dispositions in analytic metaphysics, I argue, contra Hume’s law, that Aquinas’ natural inclinations show (...) that metaphysics is foundational for ethics. I claim that agents flourish as human beings if and only if they consciously act in accordance with natural inclinations. Natural inclinations naturally tend towards goods that depend on the metaphysical structure of human nature, by virtue of which agents have some powers that they should actualise in order to flourish. Intellect and will are the rational powers that distinguish human beings from other living beings. The will naturally desires what is good. If the will, through the input of the intellect, desires what is genuinely good for human beings according to their nature, it also directs the other powers to their own actualisation. Natural inclinations do not strictly necessitate agents to act in accordance with them, because, by virtue of their rational powers, agents should also recognise that they have a reason for acting in accordance with them. Thus, I will suggest that we can best appreciate the importance of natural inclinations from the first-person perspective. (shrink)

Philosophical anarchism, in its strongest form, says that a right to be obeyed would run up against the duty to act autonomously, so there must be no one with a right to be obeyed. More recently, a parallel criticism of moral testimony has been advanced according to which there can be no right to be believed about moral matters because it would lead us to fail in our duty to form our moral beliefs for ourselves, and thus to bear responsibility (...) for the beliefs and the actions we perform on account of them. This essay advances an interpretation of both objections to practical deference and a novel solution drawing on G.E.M. Anscombe’s little discussed essay, “Authority in Morals.” I argue that the concern animating a priori anarchism and this version of moral testimony pessimism is that practical deference undermines our responsibility for our actions or beliefs. Anscombe’s discussion of teaching authority affords us a way of seeing that this is wrong-headed. In fact, the right to be obeyed or believed does not— and cannot— threaten to undermine a subject’s responsibility for what she believes or does out of deference to authority. (shrink)

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb, The Women Are up to Something. How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, Oxford University Press, New York, 2022, 326pp., ISBN 978–0–19–754107–4.

A 'no-ownership' or 'no-self theory' holds that there is no proper subject of experience; the ownership of experience can only be accounted for by invoking a sub-personal entity. In the recent self-versus-no-self debate, it is widely assumed that the no- referent view of 'I', which is closely associated with Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, implies a no-ownership theory of experience. I spell out this assumption with regard to both non-reflective and reflective consciousness and show that it is false. If (...) the so-called 'self' is an individual, the person, nothing more is required for the ownership of sensations than the non-reflective experiencing, undergoing, or suffering of them, whereas the sense of 'ownership' of reflective consciousness varies according to the type of 'I'-thought in question. Ownership of 'I'-thoughts about one's own actions, for one thing, is a matter of being able to fit future actions to them or answer questions as to why one is doing what one does. (shrink)

In his 2007 book, /Self-Consciousness/, Sebastian Rödl presents his topic—that of first-person thought—as ‘a manner of thinking of an object, or a form of reference’ to a particular thing. A decade later, in /Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism/, Rödl rejects what he now calls the ‘lingering naturalism’ of that earlier work, which he roots in the ‘dogmatic presupposition’ that ‘I’ is a word that makes reference. The volume under review comprises seventeen critical essays on /Self-Consciousness and Objectivity/, (...) together with an introduction by Jesse M. Mulder and a lengthy set of replies from Rödl. Given the scope of the issues they raise, my discussion focuses on one important thread that runs through a number of the essays, namely the question of whether Rödl’s anti-naturalism can accommodate the evident fact that at least some of the subjects of thought and judgment are individual human beings. (shrink)

This chapter interprets G. E. M. Anscombe’s discussion in §31 of Intention of the relationship between expressions of intention and descriptions of matters of fact. For Anscombe, a statement like “I’m raising my arm” or “I’m going to get up at 7:00”, which expresses an intention by saying what is happening or is going to happen, is contradicted only by an opposing command or the expression of an opposing intention. I first challenge an interpretation of this passage as claiming that (...) the truth of statements like these is somehow independent of whether the action they describe is actually performed. Against this reading, my preferred interpretation highlights the fact that Anscombe is speaking here only of what contradicts expressions of intention, while her position is that statements like these describe the world in ways that will be contrary to, and so truth-functionally incompatible with, any opposing statements of fact. (shrink)

One is sometimes, but only sometimes, justified in pursuing a suboptimal course of action due to a concern that, in attempting the ideal course, one might fail to follow through and so make the situation even worse. This paper explains why such hedging is sometimes justified and sometimes not. -/- The explanation we offer relies on Elizabeth Anscombe’s distinction between reasons and logoi. Reasons are normative considerations that identify something good or bad that an act will secure or avoid, while (...) logoi constrain which actions one may consider at all. We argue that a careful unpacking of this distinction, in light of Anscombe’s associated notion of natural unintelligibility, explains why hedging is only sometimes justified. First, the intuitively inappropriate cases of hedging all involve treating logoi as though they had the normative bearing of reasons. Second, the action-theoretic differences between reasons and logoi ground a principled explanation of why one may hedge when considering reasons but not when considering logoi. -/- Having made this argument, we then show how our approach to hedging is superior to the two approaches recently developed by Berislav Marušić and Stephen White. First, we show that their accounts give counter-intuitive results in some cases. Second, we argue that their accounts violate a plausible principle of interpersonal parity (i.e., they sometimes allow us to consider the faults of others while precluding us from considering our own faults). Finally, we argue that our account better explains how intuitions shift as we vary the details of cases. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is rightly famous. In it, she argues explicitly for several theses and implicitly for several more; studying the essay, one gets the impression that these theses are related to one another by implication—but it’s not obvious precisely how they are related. In this chapter, I suggest—less controversially, perhaps—that at the heart of “Modern Moral Philosophy” is Anscombe’s rejection of what she calls “consequentialism.” I also suggest—more controversially, perhaps—that Anscombe is articulating a tension within consequentialism: the (...) form of consequentialism presupposes the existence of a divine legislator, while the content of consequentialism presupposes the nonexistence of a divine legislator. In making this argument, I employ the work of David Solomon, a senior scholar of the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to investigate what enables human flourishing from a Thomistic perspective by considering Aquinas’ natural inclinations. I will argue that human beings flourish in different ways, depending on their practices. However, not every practice contributes to human flourishing, but only those that are consistent with human nature, which agents grasp through their natural inclinations. To support this argument, I will critically analyze MacIntyre’s account, referring mainly to his latest work (2016). MacIntyre has the merit of (...) highlighting the role of practices in human flourishing by considering the narrative dimension in the agents’ lives, but he fails to recognize the properly metaphysical framework of human nature, that would be provided by the proper consideration of natural inclinations. (shrink)

G. E. M. Anscombe gave a lecture in 1970 on the shift in attitudes toward usury between medieval and modern times. Over the course of this lecture she says a great deal about the ontology of money. Although she seems less than completely aware of the fact, her discussion marks the difference between a Roman conception of money, according to which money’s proper use destroys it, and Marx’s analysis of capitalist money, which, like a cancer, can grow endlessly. I analyze (...) this discussion of money, identify some of its shortcomings, and connect Anscombe’s lecture to earlier, more familiar strands in her thought. (shrink)

According to G.E.M Anscombe’s paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, modern moral philosophy has introduced a spurious concept of moral obligation, and has therefore made a mistake that the Greeks, and Aristotle in particular, avoided. Anscombe argues that the modern concepts of obligation, duty, and the moral ‘ought’ are the remnants of an earlier, but post-Aristotelian conception of ethics, and that they ought to be abandoned. An examination of Anscombe’s historical and philosophical claims shows that we have no reason to take them (...) seriously. In particular, they rest on a misinterpretation of Scholastic views on ‘ought’ and obligation. (shrink)

Anscombe famously said, “It is an insult and it may be an injury not to be believed.” But what is it to believe someone? My aim is to show that understanding what it is to believe someone requires a conception of a distinctive kind of interpersonal reasoning. To do so, I develop an analogy between interpersonal reasoning and an Anscombean conception of practical reasoning. I suggest that the distinctive ‘form’ of interpersonal reasoning is recognition. I furthermore argue that this is (...) to be understood as a primarily logical, rather than epistemological point. In concluding, I explain why a notion of interpersonal reasoning makes available an ethics of thought and, specifically, an account of testimonial injustice. (shrink)

This paper is an essay in what Austin (_Proc Aristotel Soc_ 57: 1–30, 1956–1957) called "linguistic phenomenology". Its focus is on showing how the grammatical features of ordinary causal verbs, as revealed in the kinds of linguistic constructions they can figure in, can shed light on the nature of the processes that these verbs are used to describe. Specifically, drawing on the comprehensive classification of English verbs founds in Levin (_English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation_, University of Chicago (...) Press, Chicago, 1993), I divide the forms of productive causal processes into five classes, corresponding to Aristotle's ontological categories: there are processes that cause change in location, in state, and in quantity; and that lead to the creation and destruction of substances. These broader categories are then subdivided into other ones, corresponding to different Levin classes, according to further differences in the causal processes they involve. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this argument to research in metaphysics and experimental philosophy. (shrink)

In a series of early essays, beginning with "Must We Mean What We Say?", Stanley Cavell offers a sustained response to the argument that ordinary language philosophy is nothing more than amateur linguistics, carried out from the armchair -- so that philosophers' claims about "what we say", and what we mean when we say it, are necessarily in need of proper empirical support. The present paper provides a close reading of Cavell and a defense of his argument that, since a (...) philosopher's descriptions of our use of words are supposed to be an expression of *self*-knowledge, they do not require, and indeed cannot possibly find, any empirical justification. This does not guarantee that these descriptions are immune to error, nor does it mean they describe a different range of facts from the ones that are the subject-matter of linguistics and lexicography. Nor, finally, does it follow from this argument that observation of the facts of ordinary usage, as revealed e.g. in linguistic corpora, is of no use to the philosopher of ordinary language. I close with a brief discussion of what the shared nature of linguistic communication shows about how to understand the "we" in "what we say". (shrink)

This thesis develops an account of ethics called the Linguistic Perspective, which is realist in a practical, non-theoretical sense, and is rooted Wittgenstein’s 'On Certainty'. On this account, normativity is intrinsic to human action and language; the norms of ethics are the logical limits of the most basic, unassailable concepts that practical reasoning requires for intelligibility. Part I lays the groundwork for this account by developing a Tractarian Reading of 'On Certainty'. Here, I contend that 'On Certainty' is primarily concerned (...) with the logical requirements and limits of language, and like the 'Tractatus' it develops these concerns in a realist direction. 'On Certainty', I argue, does so by advancing three key claims about logic: Everything descriptive of a language-game is part of logic; the boundary between logical and empirical propositions is not sharp; logic is founded on action. I investigate these claims, with particular emphasis on how natural human reactions provide logical conditions for the possibility of language. Hinge propositions, I argue, are rooted in these reactions; they point us to the limits of intelligibility of our concepts, though these limits are vague and inarticulable. In Part II, I discuss the practical syllogism and its validity. I argue that practical reasoning is distinct from theoretical reasoning and embodies a different standard of logical validity for inference. This standard is not strict and narrow, but creative and wide open; furthermore, it is an intrinsically ethical standard. Then, I advance my Linguistic Perspective on ethics, according to which human reactions provide the conditions for ethical normativity, just as they do for language. I argue that we can access ethical norms by reflecting on those linguistic concepts that are rooted in the most basic patterns of action, and by identifying the norms of behaviour that ensure the development of those concepts without contradiction. (shrink)

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of conscious control. As a result, experiments suggesting that we lack conscious control over our actions cannot be properly evaluated. Joshua Shepherd (2015; 2021) aims to fill this gap. His proposal is grounded in the standard causalist account of action, according to which, simply put, bodily movements are controlled by the agent if and only if they are caused, in the right way, by the relevant psychological states. In this paper, I (...) argue that the proposal does not succeed in distinguishing between mere causation and actual control; it does not solve the problem of deviant causation. On the basis of my criticism, Anscombean action theory promises to offer a valuable perspective. It suggests that an important function of consciousness is to integrate an action into a rational whole. If this is on the right track, it supports Shepherd’s overall claim that the importance of consciousness for action control is often underestimated, because this contribution of consciousness may often go unnoticed in experimental settings. (shrink)

The idea of ‘connatural knowledge’ is attributed to Aquinas on the basis of passages in which he distinguishes between scientific and affective experiential knowledge of religious and moral truths. In a series of encyclicals beginning with Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris, popes have celebrated and commended Aquinas as the supreme guide in philosophy and theology and in some of these cited his discovery of connatural knowledge. The course and context of his ‘elevation’ are explored before proceeding to a discussion of moral (...) knowledge in which different forms of non-theoretical cognition are identified. This leads to an examination of work by Elizabeth Anscombe on the factuality of ethical judgement and connaturality. Aquinas and Anscombe offer important insights but more work remains to be done. Moral knowledge is a many-faceted thing. More accurately, it is not one thing but many things analogously related both by their modes and by their objects. (shrink)

Review of Lipscomb, B. J. B. (2021). The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Donald Davidson established causalism, i.e. the view that reasons are causes and that action explanation is causal explanation, as the dominant view within contemporary action theory. According to his “master argument”, we must distinguish between reasons the agent merely has and reasons she has and which actually explain what she did, and the only, or at any rate the best, way to make the distinction is by saying that the reasons for which an agent acts are causes of her action. (...) “Davidson's challenge” to non‐causalists is to come up with an alternative, more convincing, way of drawing the distinction. In this paper, I argue that G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright offer such an alternative. Moreover, I argue that Davidson's own account of interpretation makes no use of his causalist claim. (shrink)

This paper investigates a particular philosophical puzzle via an examination of its status in the writings of Wittgenstein. The puzzle concerns negation and can take on three interrelated guises. The first puzzle is how not-p can so much as negate p at all – for if p is not the case, then nothing corresponds to p. The second puzzle is how not-p can so much as negate p at all when not-p rejects p not as false but as unintelligible – (...) for if p is unintelligible, then p is nothing but scratches and sounds and does not seem apt for negation. And the third puzzle is how “not” could be anything but hopelessly equivocal if it sometimes (per the first puzzle) requires, and sometimes (per the second puzzle) precludes the intelligibility of p. The paper investigates these three puzzles, their respective structures, and their relations to each other. The second puzzle is expounded as the centre of gravity, and in countering two objections to the threefold puzzle, a special predicament is expounded with regard to the second puzzle’s concern with unipolar propositions – propositions that do not admit of an intelligible negation. The text concludes by indicating the first steps that could potentially lead us out of the threefold puzzle. (shrink)

Practical knowledge, in the sense made famous by G. E. M. Anscombe, is “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions”. This knowledge is very ordinary, but philosophically it is not easy to understand. One illuminating approach is to see practical knowledge as a kind of self-knowledge or self-consciousness. I offer an enrichment of this approach, by (1) exploiting Gilbert Ryle’s discussion of heeding (that is, paying attention), in particular paying attention to one’s own intentional action, and (2) (...) constructing and applying a practical analogue of Kant’s apperceptive “I think”. Combining (1) and (2), I offer an argument for my main claim—paying attention to what one is doing is an exercise of practical self-consciousness – it is how practical self-consciousness gets “schematized”. (shrink)

One of Elizabeth Anscombe’s most decisive legacies is the rejection of modern legalistic morality, in the name of a rescue of Aristotelian-inspired natural normativity. However, as I will argue in this contribution, this legacy does not seem to have been fully collected, neither by those who, like Philippa Foot, are explicitly inspired by Anscombe’s work, nor by those who, while apparently opposing its assumptions, have also somehow recovered it by different routes, as emblematically does Christine Korsgaard in her constitutivist proposal. (...) In more detail, I aim to explore the relationship between teleology and normativity at the crossroads between neo-Aristotelian naturalism and constitutivism: both theories, though opposed, rest normativity on a link between function (the Aristotelian ergon) and practical reason and fail precisely in declining this relationship convincingly. (shrink)

A central notion in Benjamin Lipscomb's narrative of the rise of the ‘Wartime Quartet’—Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch—is that of philosophical pictures (e.

A central idea in Anscombe's philosophy of action is that of practical knowledge, the formally distinctive knowledge a person has of what she is intentionally doing. Anscombe also discusses 'practical truth', an idea she borrows from Aristotle, and which on her interpretation is a kind of truth whose bearer is not thought or language, but action. What is the relationship between practical knowledge and practical truth? What we might call the 'Simple View' of this relationship holds that practical knowledge is (...) essentially knowledge of practical truth. But the Simple View isn't obviously available, since we have practical knowledge of all of our intentional actions, whereas an action manifests practical truth in Aristotle's sense only if it is a case of doing or living well. I suggest that we distinguish a thicker ethical version and a thinner action-theoretical version of each notion. This allows us to maintain a - complex - version of the Simple View, on which practical knowledge in the thick ethical sense is knowledge of practical truth in the thick ethical sense, and practical knowledge in the thin action-theoretical sense is knowledge of practical truth in the thin action-theoretical sense. Although Anscombe did not make these distinctions explicitly, I argue that she nevertheless commits herself to them in her discussion. (shrink)

-/- Did the US president who signed the order to use the atomic bomb stain his hands with blood or just ink? Are there cases in which a war is just? In such cases, is any war justifiable? Is ending the life of a terminally ill person different from murder? Do we need to agree on the definition of the embryo as a 'person' to know whether any action on the embryo is prohibited? Is the prohibition of contraception justified even (...) if it is perfectly legitimate to plan births? Anscombe, taking up Wittgenstein, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, elaborates a theory of action that places "intention" at the centre, an alternative to the conception of action dominant since Descartes. On this basis, he conducts an indictment against the superficiality of modern moral philosophy, lumping together the Oxford philosophers, utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. And finally, she puts her virtue ethics to work on problems of applied ethics: in the field of public ethics, the just war; in the field of bioethics, questions of the end of life and the beginning of life. This book, edited by Sergio Cremaschi, brings together Anscombe's contributions on ethical issues, allowing for the first time a comprehensive overview of this decisive figure's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot all studied at Oxford University during the Second World War. One of their wartime tutors was Donald MacKinnon. This paper gives a broad overview of MacKinnon's philosophical outlook as it was developing at this time. Four talks from between 1938 and 1941—‘And the Son of Man That Thou Visiteth Him’ (1938), ‘What Is a Metaphysical Statement?’ (1940), ‘The Function of Philosophy in Education’ (1941) and ‘Revelation and Social Justice’ (1941)—give a foretaste (...) of the conception of moral philosophy that he later articulated in A Study of Ethical Theory (1957). We identify aspects of his philosophical outlook and unusual treatment of method that likely shaped his teaching. We trace his influence in the work of Midgley, Murdoch and Foot, all of whom studied with him from Trinity Term 1940 until their finals in 1942. In the case of Anscombe, though she was briefly his student—he taught her Plato—she and MacKinnon moved in shared intellectual circles, and there is reason to think that some of the forces that shaped MacKinnon's outlook also shaped hers. The sketch we offer is incomplete—in particular, we are not able to do justice to MacKinnon's explicitly theological writings—but we hope to achieve three things. First, to go some way towards indicating the importance of the teacher MacKinnon to understanding the work of his better-known pupils. Second, to introduce a philosopher for whom the teaching of philosophy, practical ethics and metaphysical theory were deeply entwined. Third, to reflect on the relationship between, on the one hand, a conception of the practice and significance of metaphysics and, on the other, a view on the role and nature of philosophical teaching and learning. (shrink)

In his reference letter for Murdoch’s 1947 fellowship application at Newnham College, Cambridge, her erstwhile Oxford undergraduate tutor, Donald MacKinnon, remarks that Murdoch is ‘on the threshold of creative work of a high order’. This chapter outlines the nature of that ‘creative work’ and its early development. We show how Murdoch’s close study of the Christian existentialist philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel (1883–1973) came to inflect both her early critique of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism and her first attempts to show (...) the limits of logical positivism. We explain how once at Cambridge, Murdoch’s exposure to Wittgenstein’s method, through her philosophical friendship with Elizabeth Anscombe, gave her the conceptual means to recast those aspects of Marcel’s thought (as well as those of Martin Buber) that she believed were important but, as she wrote in her application, ‘vague’. We show, finally, how both strands of Murdoch’s thinking are later brought into synchrony in the much-discussed example of M&D. This, in turn, allows us to isolate Murdoch’s understanding of the individual’s relation to their own ‘ghostly past’ and to reveal the importance of Murdoch’s early encounters with Anscombe and Marcel. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has focused on the provocative suggestion that there is a deep unity linking the philosophical projects of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. In addition to providing scholars with the opportunity to consider what these four shared, the unanimity story also offers an occasion to reflect on what is distinctive about each. Whereas Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley each turn to broadly Aristotelian resources for developing an alternative to the dominant non‐cognitivism of their day, Murdoch turns (...) to Platonic ones. The nature of Murdoch's Platonism, however, is not always well understood and has been identified as a “recurring question.” This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing attempt to understand Murdoch's distinctive, Platonic alternative to the ethical non‐cognitivism of her day. I contend that Murdoch's philosophical method, especially its transcendental elements, is an unexplored resource for better understanding the character of her Platonism as a modest one. (shrink)

The paper attempts to discuss two contrasting views on Aristotle’s notion of ‘virtue’ advocated by Immanuel Kant and G. E. M. Anscombe. Kant maintains that good will is the primary condition of moral action. It is the foundation of moral laws. Virtue is given the secondary status while describing the nature of moral conduct. On the contrary, Anscombe is critical of this Kantian normative approach to the virtue. In her contention, the Kantian deontology excludes the psychological conditions while theorizing morality. (...) This exclusion undermines not only the importance of virtue for the development of moral character, but also fails to judge motive and situation which are essential for investigating the intention of action. In conclusion, we would suggest that any overemphasis on rational construal of morality might restrict human freedom and thereby puts a veil on the basic content of humanity. (shrink)

Volume 30, Issue 6, December 2022, Page 1144-1146.

In “Causality and Determination”, Anscombe stressed that, in her view, physical determinism and free action were incompatible. As the relevant passage suggests, her espousal of incompatibilism was not merely due to specific features of human ‘ethical’ freedom, but due to general features of agency, intentionality, and voluntariness. For Anscombe went on to tentatively suggest that lack of physical determination was required for the intentional conduct of animals we would not classify as ‚free‘, too. In this paper, I examine three different (...) lines of argument to establish Anscombe’s latter suggestion, which are based on general considerations about the causal efficacy of psychological-agential phenomena, the nature of agency, and the specific features of intentional agency. I start with Anscombe’s own claim from “The Causation of Action” that microphysical determinism would make psychological and personal phenomena epiphenomenal, before I turn to the view of ‘Agency Incompatibilism’, that genuine agency requires the absence of antecedent necessitation, and, lastly, to concerns about some crucial features of intentional agency which we find in both human and animal agents. (shrink)

Towards the end of her famous 1971 paper “Causality and Determination”, Elizabeth Anscombe discusses the controversial idea that “ ‘physical haphazard’ could be the only physical correlate of human freedom of action”. In order to illustrate how the high-level freedom of human action can go together with micro-indeterminism without creating a problem for micro-statistics, she provides the analogy of a glass box filled with minute coloured particles whose micro-dynamics is subject to statistical laws, while its outside reliably displays a recognisable (...) variation of a certain image created by an external cause. Anscombe’s example is somewhat enigmatic, and she provides no details to support its viability. In this paper we discuss the context of Anscombe’s analogy, and we provide basics of the theory and practice of building an Anscombe box. (shrink)

Anscombe ends her seminal 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” with a presentation of five characters, each answering an ancient (and contemporary) question as to “whether one might ever need to commit injustice, or whether it won’t be the best thing to do?” Her fifth character is the execrated consequentialist who “shows a corrupt mind.” But who are the first four characters? Do they “show a mind”? And what precisely is the significance (if any) of her presenting those five just then? (...) In this paper, we interpret Anscombe’s essay with an eye to making sense of her character presentation. We argue that the first four characters can be seen to embody the chief negative and positive doctrines of the essay and to thereby represent and charter a pluralistic school of anti-consequentialist ethics. The upshot is something exegetically interesting yet of broader philosophical importance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J. B. LipscombAmy Gilbert RichardsLIPSCOMB, Benjamin J. B. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xxx + 326 pp. Cloth, $27.95In The Women Are Up to Something, Lipscomb demonstrates in form (...) and content the inextricable link between philosophical theory and personal story and character. The book tells two stories: "first, a story [End Page 148] about four women, their overlapping friendships, and their struggle to establish themselves as philosophers in an often-hostile context; second, a story about two conflicting approaches to ethics." These two stories connect through the role these women played in the development of the second of the conflicting approaches—a challenge to the mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge orthodoxy in metaethics, what Lipscomb later calls a "minority report."Chapter 1 centers on the fact–value divide. The consequence of this divide for ethics lies in its banishment of all evaluative terms from the realm of possible facts, thereby demoting them to matters of "opinion." Lipscomb here offers a genealogy of the divide. He also introduces the insight that will become the seed of the minority report: The picture of the world offered by the fact-value divide is just that, a picture. Bringing to light the deep background pictures that undergird our understanding of the world is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks. But the picture rooted in the fact–value divide includes the claim that the divide itself is simply a "fact"—not a picture at all, and therefore not contestable. Lipscomb labels this view "the Dawkins' sublime."The next three chapters continue the work of stage-setting. Chapter 2 immerses us in the Oxford of the women's undergraduate years—an Oxford temporarily but dramatically altered by World War II, where female students made up a much larger percentage of the undergraduate population than was usual, and where professors were in a new way open to mentoring women. Chapter 3 briefly recounts all four childhoods, lived in the aftermath of the first World War. Chapter 4 returns to Oxford and narrates the graduate degrees of the four women. It also offers a perceptive primer on the history of analytic ethics, culminating in the state of the field at the point when the women were on the cusp of entering it—the precise shape of the approach to ethics the women would eventually abjure.Each of the next four chapters traces the development of the mature philosophy of one of the four women—in order: Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley. Despite deep differences among their philosophical and theological outlooks, they all four came to defend a version of the thesis, commonplace in ancient and medieval philosophy, that there are things that are good for human beings qua human being, that our moral lives are largely a matter of seeing and responding—well or poorly—to these elements of the human good that are given as part of our nature. In other words, there are facts about values. We in crucial ways discover rather than invent morality.The last chapter serves as an epilogue to both stories: It traces the ways in which the writing and lives of these four women produced a decisive change in the landscape of Anglo-American philosophy. Lipscomb notes which strains in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy owe their existence to the minority report. Figures like Korsgaard feature as contemporary representatives of an ethics grounded in the fact–value [End Page 149] divide. Figures like MacIntyre and Hursthouse feature as inheritors of the philosophical legacy of the book's heroines.In this final chapter Lipscomb also offers brief portraits of the later life and death of each of the women in turn. At the end of the final portrait, the book rounds to a poetic close—not offering a final philosophical statement but reflecting on the fruits of friendship and the power of its legacy for those who come after.It is difficult to pin down Lipscomb's precise philosophical... (shrink)

Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims—claims about how things must, or could or could not be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterize what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical (...) writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy. (shrink)

The Manifestation Requirement, advanced by Dummett in his critique of semantic realism, has been criticized for being behavioristic, and the responses have been made that the critics are mistaken. However, the dispute has failed to exhibit the point of the Requirement. In this paper, I shall argue (1) that, in the light of Anscombe's theory of practical knowledge, knowledge of linguistic meaning is to be seen as the knowledge-how that forms the basis of the practical knowledge that an agent has (...) of his own intentional actions, (2) that such knowledge of linguistic meaning is to be based on mutual agreements in a community, and (3) that the Manifestation Requirement is a condition for the possibility of such mutual agreements. As a result, the Manifestation Requirement finds its basis on the idea that language and linguistic acts are tools that we use while continually improving them. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the difference between expression of intention and expression of emotion through a discussion of a passage from G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention, where she claims that expression of intention, unlike expression of emotion, is “purely conventional”. I argue that this claim is grounded on the fact that, although emotions can be described, expressions of emotion are not descriptions at all. Similarly, expressions of intention are not descriptions of a present state of mind but are rather the expression (...) of a special sort of foreknowledge of a purported action. They are, in this respect, distinct from expression of emotion, since they are a description of some future happening. Now, the centrally descriptive character of expressions of intention is what makes them “purely conventional”. But of course, Anscombe argues, one can have an intention without expressing it. And having an intention does not amount to having some description in mind. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 266-269, March 2021.

This paper takes Anscombe, Mumford and Anjum as key interlocutors for an exploration of the causality involved in our understanding of free will. Anscombe tried to disentangle causality from necessary determination in order to make room for free will, and a first section points to the historical and theological background of this entanglement. However, what is also crucially at stake is the relation between time and causality whereby this paper advocates a shift from a diachronic to a synchronic conception. This (...) synchronic conception of the contingency of free will is then argued to be superior to Mumford and Anjum’s dispositional modality in providing the libertarian desiderata of alternative possibilities and ultimate authorship, and gives us a picture of a permanent causal tug-of-war in the present. The final section then points out that this puts persons and their contingent decisions partly in the role of being an explanans for, rather than an explanandum of, any current contingent state of affairs. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 706-727, September 2021.

What a person is doing often depends on that person’s thought about what they are doing, or about the wider circumstances of their action. For example, whether my killing is murder or manslaughter depends, in part, on whether I understand that what I am doing is killing you, and on whether I understand that my killing is unjustified. Similarly, if I know that the backpack I am taking is yours, then my taking it may be an act of theft; but (...) it is not theft if I simply mistook your backpack for my own. And if I don’t know that in signing a document I’m promising to do some thing, then in signing it I’m not promising to do this at all. -/- According to Elizabeth Anscombe, a central task of philosophical psychology is to articulate this dependency of action on thought. And in a range of papers published during the 1960s, Anscombe sought to elucidate various aspects of this dependency. In this paper we give a systematic overview of how Anscombe understands this dependency, and in the process reveal the conceptual framework underlying Anscombe’s thinking about perception, desire, intention, voluntariness, responsibility, guilt, and sin. (shrink)