G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001)
Author of Intention
About the Author
G.E.M. Anscombe (1919-2001) read classics and philosophy at St Hugh's College, Oxford from 1937 to 1941 in which year she married the philosopher Peter Geach. She subsequently researched in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge where she became a student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of show more his literary executors, she played a large part in editing his unpublished works and was their principal English translator. In 1946 she returned to Oxford and was appointed University Lecturer in 1951. From 1970 until her retirement in 1986 she held the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge. show less
Image credit: G. E. M. Anscombe
Series
Works by G. E. M. Anscombe
Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe (St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs) (2005) 71 copies
Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs) (2008) 48 copies
From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe (St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs) (2011) 17 copies
Modern Moral Philosophy 5 copies
Associated Works
The Blue and Brown Books (Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations) (1958) — Translator, some editions — 1,460 copies, 5 reviews
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: The Inner and the Outer, 1949 - 1951, Volume 2 (1993) — Editor — 42 copies
The Sheed and Ward Anthology of Catholic Philosophy (A Sheed & Ward Classic) (2005) — Contributor — 33 copies
Modern thinkers and ancient thinkers : the Stanley Victor Keeling Memorial Lectures at University College, London (1993) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Anscombe, G. E. M.
- Legal name
- Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret
- Other names
- Anscombe, Elizabeth
- Birthdate
- 1919-03-18
- Date of death
- 2001-01-05
- Gender
- female
- Education
- St. Hugh's College, Oxford (AB first class honours|Greats)
- Occupations
- philosopher
- Awards and honors
- British Academy (Fellow)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences - Relationships
- Geach, P.T. (spouse)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (teacher) - Short biography
- Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe, was born in Limerick, Ireland, to British parents while her father was serving as an officer in the British Army. She became interested in the Roman Catholic faith and converted while still an undergraduate at St. Hugh's, Oxford, in 1941. Later that year, she married Peter Geach, a fellow philosophy student with whom she would have seven children. After graduating with first class honors and spending another year at St. Hugh's as a research student, she moved to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she had a Research Fellowship. At Cambridge she met Ludwig Wittgenstein and attended his lectures, continuing to do so even after she had moved back to Oxford to take up a Research Fellowship at Somerville College in 1946. She later had a Teaching Fellowship there until 1970, when she became the Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. She remained there until she retired from teaching in 1986. After Wittgenstein died in 1951, having named Anscombe as one of three literary executors of his estate, she began translating his works into English. Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, introduced his philosophy to the English-speaking world. Anscombe published several important works of her own, including Intention (1957). She is best known for her work on ethics and the philosophy of action.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Limerick, Ireland
- Places of residence
- Cambridge, England, UK
- Place of death
- Cambridge, England, UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- Cambridge, England, UK
Members
Discussions
G.E.M. Anscombe in Philosophy and Theory (February 2011)
Reviews
Intentionality is a mental state that has such a formidable influence on how we make assessments about accountability and moral responsibility that it is unexpected just how challenging it is to grasp what kind of thing an intention is.
Intentions are mental states. They are the “why” of our actions, but is the object of one’s intention the same thing as the object of one’s action? There are many reasons to problematize that relationship. We can intend to do something and then not do show more it. Or we can intend to do something that doesn’t happen without us ever letting go of our intention. We can also act without intention; our bodies make involuntary actions all the time. Even actions that we may understand to be guided by intentions are not clearly delineated by the boundaries of our intentions. For example, if I intend to be at my desk writing my comments on this book, that may be my intended action, but I am also making a noise from my keyboard and I am adding my body heat to the room, neither of which are intentional but they are my actions. There are also acts that we think of as intentional that follow from a series of intentional and unintentional acts. How, for example, does my intentional act of getting up from my desk to get a pencil and write a note to someone result, ultimately, in the intentional action of that person letting the dog outside later in the day? Less trivially, how does a person’s signature on an order result in an action that brings about a morally dubious result? Whose intention entails the intentional acts that follow? Who bears responsibility?
Elizabeth Anscombe attempts to answer these problems methodically, a process that reveals the logical inconsistencies of attempting to make truth-conditional statements about intentions when all that we really have are 1) the potentially unreliable things that people say about their intentions, and 2) a field of observable actions in the world, some of which are entailed by intention and some of which are not. Ultimately, Anscombe decides that the Aristotelian notion of practical reason, expressible in a practical syllogism (e.g., major premise establishing a universal desire or need + minor premise of local circumstance resulting in a conclusion that a particular action is required) allows us the best access to intention. The formation of intention is the logical entailment that comes from accepting the soundness of the premises and the conclusion about what action is necessary. At least this is how I take her point, which is not always entirely clear.
One point that I wish Anscombe had dealt more with is agency or how people perceive their ability to act in response to a logically derived course of action. The practical syllogism works pretty well for explaining intentional actions for which the action immediately follows assessment of the premises, but she also established that actions can be seen as part of causal chains of “I intend P in order to Q,” where the Q of one action formulation becomes the P of the next. For example, I select a pencil to write a note. I place the note where it will be seen by another person. That person reads the note. That person understands the message. That person completes the action that I intended. At each stage of this chain there is a possibility of a divergent path to be followed, especially when the intended or likely outcomes of an action are further from one’s direct control. The wind may blow the note away. Someone other than the intended recipient may find the note. The note may be misunderstood, etc. It is not until we get close to the intended action that the path toward that ultimate outcome becomes more and more likely, and perhaps in some cases inevitable. For instance, if I just scrap the idea of writing a note and ask the person to take the action I intend there are fewer possible divergent paths leading away from my intended action. These kinds of differences begin to matter if the outcome is morally objectionable because at what point does one start to bear responsibility for those intentions? Or at what level of remove does one’s responsibility lessen?*
Surprisingly, there is not much discussion of this kind of agency or of agency that extends beyond a person’s immediate control. Following Anscombe’s famous example of the person pumping water from a well known to be poisoned, the person pumping the water might not see his moral culpability if that water is delivered to the house and consumed if he limits his intentionality by the scope of his job duties (i.e., my job is to bring water to the house). However, playing out these actions along a network of intervening human and non-human actors one might be able to see results that may not be necessary outcomes but are likely ones. If this person pumps poisoned water into a pitcher and brings the pitcher to the house, how does that intentional action then interact with other downstream intentional actions that involve the pitcher of water (e.g., drinking, cooking, etc.)? It seems that a question of agency must come into the analysis.
*See Anscombe’s speech to her Oxford U colleagues about why Truman should not be awarded an honorary degree because of his authorization to drop atomic bombs on Japan: “Mr. Truman’s Degree.” show less
Intentions are mental states. They are the “why” of our actions, but is the object of one’s intention the same thing as the object of one’s action? There are many reasons to problematize that relationship. We can intend to do something and then not do show more it. Or we can intend to do something that doesn’t happen without us ever letting go of our intention. We can also act without intention; our bodies make involuntary actions all the time. Even actions that we may understand to be guided by intentions are not clearly delineated by the boundaries of our intentions. For example, if I intend to be at my desk writing my comments on this book, that may be my intended action, but I am also making a noise from my keyboard and I am adding my body heat to the room, neither of which are intentional but they are my actions. There are also acts that we think of as intentional that follow from a series of intentional and unintentional acts. How, for example, does my intentional act of getting up from my desk to get a pencil and write a note to someone result, ultimately, in the intentional action of that person letting the dog outside later in the day? Less trivially, how does a person’s signature on an order result in an action that brings about a morally dubious result? Whose intention entails the intentional acts that follow? Who bears responsibility?
Elizabeth Anscombe attempts to answer these problems methodically, a process that reveals the logical inconsistencies of attempting to make truth-conditional statements about intentions when all that we really have are 1) the potentially unreliable things that people say about their intentions, and 2) a field of observable actions in the world, some of which are entailed by intention and some of which are not. Ultimately, Anscombe decides that the Aristotelian notion of practical reason, expressible in a practical syllogism (e.g., major premise establishing a universal desire or need + minor premise of local circumstance resulting in a conclusion that a particular action is required) allows us the best access to intention. The formation of intention is the logical entailment that comes from accepting the soundness of the premises and the conclusion about what action is necessary. At least this is how I take her point, which is not always entirely clear.
One point that I wish Anscombe had dealt more with is agency or how people perceive their ability to act in response to a logically derived course of action. The practical syllogism works pretty well for explaining intentional actions for which the action immediately follows assessment of the premises, but she also established that actions can be seen as part of causal chains of “I intend P in order to Q,” where the Q of one action formulation becomes the P of the next. For example, I select a pencil to write a note. I place the note where it will be seen by another person. That person reads the note. That person understands the message. That person completes the action that I intended. At each stage of this chain there is a possibility of a divergent path to be followed, especially when the intended or likely outcomes of an action are further from one’s direct control. The wind may blow the note away. Someone other than the intended recipient may find the note. The note may be misunderstood, etc. It is not until we get close to the intended action that the path toward that ultimate outcome becomes more and more likely, and perhaps in some cases inevitable. For instance, if I just scrap the idea of writing a note and ask the person to take the action I intend there are fewer possible divergent paths leading away from my intended action. These kinds of differences begin to matter if the outcome is morally objectionable because at what point does one start to bear responsibility for those intentions? Or at what level of remove does one’s responsibility lessen?*
Surprisingly, there is not much discussion of this kind of agency or of agency that extends beyond a person’s immediate control. Following Anscombe’s famous example of the person pumping water from a well known to be poisoned, the person pumping the water might not see his moral culpability if that water is delivered to the house and consumed if he limits his intentionality by the scope of his job duties (i.e., my job is to bring water to the house). However, playing out these actions along a network of intervening human and non-human actors one might be able to see results that may not be necessary outcomes but are likely ones. If this person pumps poisoned water into a pitcher and brings the pitcher to the house, how does that intentional action then interact with other downstream intentional actions that involve the pitcher of water (e.g., drinking, cooking, etc.)? It seems that a question of agency must come into the analysis.
*See Anscombe’s speech to her Oxford U colleagues about why Truman should not be awarded an honorary degree because of his authorization to drop atomic bombs on Japan: “Mr. Truman’s Degree.” show less
O livro de Anscombe investiga o que é a intencionalidade, quando ainda não haviam grandes teorias sobre o assunto e encaminha o problema para a ideia de que ações intencionais devem poder responder satisfatoriamente à pergunta de sua razão. Assim, a intencionalidade vê-se enredada no jogo que será dito o de dar e pedir razões e suas extensões para os não falantes, desde que antes disso nós já possuamos toda a articulação conceitual que a pergunta "por que?" ocasiona. De todo show more modo a intenção também está ligada ao âmbito da ação, e liga as ações à possibilidade de perguntar sobre o porquê de elas terem sido feitas ou planejadas para serem realizadas. O que é difícil no livro é que é fácil se perder nos diversos exemplos mundanos ou nem tanto, mas que partem de uma análise da linguagem ordinário. A influência de Wittgenstein é patente e talvez a partir dela exista uma relutância em determinar o que deve ser entendido como os pontos principais e para onde a argumentação está indo que, apesar de trechos muito interessantes, tirou-me um tanto do interesse. show less
This is a useful compendium of the most famous of Descartes' philosophical writings. A contemporary translation includes both the Discourse and the well-known Meditations on First Philosophy.
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