G. E. M. Anscombe: Living the Truth

Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

G. E. M. Anscombe, widely recognized as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, died on January 5 in Cambridge, England, at the age of eighty-one. Few thinkers can claim solid footing in two traditions; she was deeply grounded in three: classical philosophy (particularly Aristotle), Catholicism (especially Aquinas and Anselm), and the flowering of modern philosophy stimulated by Gottlieb Frege. From the time she denounced Britain’s participation in World War II as a girl (because it was plain to her, just months out of her teens, that Britain would be carrying out deliberate attacks on civilians), through her widely publicized opposition as a young don to Oxford’s awarding an honorary degree to Harry Truman (on the ground that “having a couple of massacres to his credit” disqualifies a man for public honors), to her recent arrests in her seventies for participation in pro-life actions parallel to those carried out by “Operation Rescue” in the United States (because she found the life of a conceived child as worthy of protection and respect as any other), her life recalls John Paul II’s injunction: “Always seek the truth; venerate the truth discovered; obey the truth. There is no joy beyond this search, this veneration and obedience.” She knew the joy of that search, and she knew what it is to “obey the truth.” It is fitting that her last major discourse, the inaugural lecture for an endowed chair she held at the International Institute for Philosophy in Liechtenstein, was titled “Die Wahrheit Thun” (“Doing the Truth”).

The daughter of Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe and Alan Wells Anscombe (science master at Dulwich College), Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, known to the academic world as “Miss Anscombe” and to her friends as “Elizabeth,” was born on March 18, 1919 in Limerick, Ireland, where her father, then a British army officer, was posted. In 1937, she graduated from Sydenham High School and entered Oxford where she read “Mods & Greats” (classics, ancient history, and philosophy) at St. Hugh’s College. In her first year at Oxford, she converted to Catholicism. In 1938, after mass at Blackfriars on the Feast of Corpus Christi, she met Peter Geach, a young man three years her senior who was also a recent convert to Catholicism. Like her, Geach was destined to achieve eminence in philosophy, but philosophy played no role in bringing about the romance that blossomed. Smitten by Miss Anscombe’s beauty and voice, Geach immediately inquired of mutual friends whether she was “reliably Catholic.” Upon learning that she was, he pursued her and, swiftly, their hearts were entangled. Since three years of the Greats curriculum were still before her, they postponed marriage. As Miss Anscombe pursued her undergraduate studies, Geach was her philosophical mentor (remaining her deeply valued philosophical interlocutor and collaborator the rest of her life). They married in 1941, after she had graduated (with a First) and been awarded a research fellowship at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. The following year, 1942, she was awarded a research fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge. When this fellowship expired, she was elected to a research fellowship (later to an official fellowship) at Somerville College, Oxford, remaining there until 1970.

Though she was a beginning graduate student when she and Ludwig Wittgenstein met in Cambridge in the 1940s, he soon recognized her remarkable philosophical powers and they became good friends. He named her an executor (along with Rush Rhees and G. H. von Wright) of his literary estate and entrusted to her the task of translating his works, including his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations . Before his death in 1951, he arranged for her to spend an extended time in Vienna to strengthen her German and absorb nuances of his own Viennese dialect. In 1970, Anscombe was appointed to the chair Wittgenstein had occupied at Cambridge University, a position she held until her retirement from teaching in 1986.

Her international reputation as a formidable debater had early roots. At Oxford in 1948, she took on (and trounced) C. S. Lewis in a debate still discussed a half-century later. It focused on the third chapter of his book Miracles . Everyone present (including Lewis) recognized that the young philosophy don’s penetrating critique had undone his arguments. Some writers think that it had also undone him. A. N. Wilson, ignoring Lewis’ actual literary production after 1948, asserts that “The confrontation with Elizabeth Anscombe . . . drove him into the form of literature for which he is today most popular: children’s stories.” More scrupulous writers also portray the debate as a “humiliating experience” (George Sayer), a turning point in his life that Lewis recalled “with real horror” (Derek Brewer). Sayer asserts that the experience led Lewis to abandon theology and characterizes his subsequent religious writings as “devotional” and “without contentious arguments.” Anscombe rejected claims that Lewis altered his aims as a result of the debate. Lewis undeniably did do something: he rewrote the contested chapter, taking into account her criticisms. Anscombe deemed this an act of admirable intellectual honesty. She and Lewis were dinner companions a few weeks after the debate and enjoyed a pleasant evening—scarcely the sequel one would expect if the encounter had left Lewis quivering in self-doubt. (Anscombe’s critique of Lewis, her first purely philosophical publication, appeared in the Socratic Digest [Oxford] in 1948 and is reprinted, with comments by her about the debate, in volume two of her collected papers, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind .)

Anscombe, an analytic philosopher, wrote:

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G. E. M. Anscombe: Living the Truth