## 1. Life



She was born in Limerick, Ireland 18 March 1919 to Allen Wells
Anscombe and Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (nee Thomas). At the
time of her birth her father was serving in the British Army. The
family later returned to England where her father resumed his career
as a schoolmaster, while her mother, a classical scholar, worked as a
headmistress.



An inquisitive child, Anscombe decided to convert to Roman Catholicism
in her early teens. She attended the Sydenham School, graduating in
1937, and went on to St. Hugh's College, Oxford. During her
early years at Oxford she met three young women who also had
remarkable careers in philosophy: Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and,
above all, Philippa Foot, with whom she developed a deep friendship
her entire life (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman 2022). Anscombe received a
First in Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) in 1941. After
her graduation she remained at St. Hugh's as a research student,
and in 1942 moved to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ludwig
Wittgenstein. She believed that attending Wittgenstein's
lectures freed her from the trap of phenomenalism that had so plagued
her (MPM, ix). In 1946 she was offered a Research Fellowship at
Somerville College, Oxford, and was appointed to a teaching Fellowship
there in 1964. She moved from Oxford to Cambridge in 1970 when she was
awarded a Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge - the Chair formerly
occupied by Wittgenstein. She remained at Cambridge until her
retirement in 1986.



In 1938, at Oxford, she met the philosopher Peter Geach, who then was
studying at Balliol. They were both receiving instruction from the
same Dominican priest. They were married in 1941, and had three sons
and four daughters.



In 1948, the young Anscombe read a paper [CSL] to the Socratic Club
attacking an argument offered by C. S. Lewis in his book
*Miracles*. In Chapter 3 of that book Lewis argued that
naturalism is self-refuting. Lewis attended her talk, and, although
accounts vary, some acquaintances report that he was crushed by her
withering criticism. In any case, Lewis significantly rewrote the
relevant chapter in the subsequent edition of his book.



Anscombe also became one of Wittgenstein's good friends and
then, after his death in 1951, the chief translator of his work into
English. Ray Monk wrote that Anscombe was "...one of
Wittgenstein's closest friends and one of his most trusted
students, an exception to his general dislike of academic women and
especially of female philosophers." (Monk 1991, 498).



Anscombe did not avoid controversy. In 1956 she publicly opposed
Oxford University's decision to award an honorary degree to
Harry Truman, whom she considered a murderer for intentionally killing
the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. She also courted
controversy by coming out in print against contraception (see below),
and engaging in civil disobedience at abortion clinics.



Anscombe famously flouted gender conventions: she did not take her
husband's name, she frequently wore men's clothes, she
smoked cigars, and she was prone to cursing and vulgar speech.
Although influenced by several men - Frege, Wittgenstein, Geach,
various Catholic thinkers historical and contemporaneous -
Anscombe was a fiercely independent and original philosopher. Those
who suspect she merely echoed or applied the views of another person
are sorely mistaken.



Anscombe continued to produce original work beyond her retirement.
Peter Geach, for example, reported in *Analysis* that she had
constructed a novel paradox late in life (Geach 2006,
266-7).



Anscombe died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001.


## 2. Moral and Political Philosophy



Anscombe's philosophical work does not form a system. But
understanding her thoughts in moral and political philosophy helps one
grasp some of her wider philosophical motivations, especially those on
the topics of action and intention. We will first discuss several of
her most well-known papers in moral and political philosophy, for this
will shed light on her interest in these other areas.



In her infamous pamphlet "Mr. Truman's Degree" (MTD)
(1958), Anscombe protested Oxford's decision to award Harry
Truman an honorary doctorate. Some of the ideas in this pamphlet were
later developed in "War and Murder" (WAM) (1972), written
for a Christian venue.



She opposed Oxford's decision to honor Truman on the grounds
that Truman was a murderer. He was a murderer, because "choosing
to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder"
(MTD, 66). The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were by and large
noncombatants, neither fighting the Allies nor supplying Japan with
the means of fighting them. She argued that killing these innocent
people seemed necessary only because the Allies stupidly insisted that
Japan unconditionally surrender.



One defense of Truman that she mentions and briefly opposes goes like
this: Truman didn't *really* kill anybody; he merely
signed a piece of paper. Another goes like this: if killing innocent
people were really murderous, then it would be murderous to kill enemy
soldiers while they are sleeping, for at that moment they aren't
harming anyone (MTD, 67). Both of these moves rest on an implicit view
of what action (e.g. killing, harming) is. Opposing this view of
action motivated Anscombe's own later work on action and
intention, discussed below in Section 4.



In WAM, Anscombe wrote at greater length about the difference between
murdering and other forms of killing. She distinguished choosing to
kill the innocent as a means to your end, which is always murder, from
choosing to do something else which you know as a statistical
certainty will kill the innocent. Bombing civilian populations *in
order to* provoke surrender is clearly a case of the former. The
latter might or might not also be murder - it depends upon some
details. It's possible to administer a drug to alleviate the
horrid pain of someone in mortal illness, knowing full well that,
alas, the patient will thereby die sooner, but not thereby murder your
patient. The patient's death might not have been your end, nor a
means to any such end. This difference in an action's
*structure* bears upon whether it constitutes murder. That is,
what makes some forms of killing murder is not our opposition to it,
nor the fact that it is unjust or wrong. Rather, some forms of killing
are aptly *described* as murder, which we then might condemn
and oppose.



In WAM, Anscombe also argued that human society is essential to human
good, that the state is necessary for such society, and thus the state
must have some right to use even deadly violence against those who
attack it. (She defends some of these claims in greater detail in
SAS.) But while pacifism is misguided, so too is the view that the
state or its officers may do anything to defend itself. Killing is
sometimes unjust, sometimes not. But warriors and police are often
tempted to kill even those who are not unjustly attacking it, and, she
holds, to kill the innocent deliberately is always murder, and,
moreover, murder is always unjust.



To kill someone deliberately, she notes, is to kill someone either for
its own sake or as a means to some further end. Such killing is
intentional. By contrast, Anscombe claims that the distinction between
the intended and the merely foreseen is "absolutely
essential" to Christian ethics. Some actions (e.g. murder)
Christian ethics always prohibits or forbids, and intentional killing
of the innocent is on this list.



Some people had instead held that one can direct one's
intentions a certain way to achieve the desired result with moral
impunity. If, for example, one tells oneself that by doing *y*
one is really only intending *x*, then one is off the hook,
even if *y* is forbidden.



> 
> The devout Catholic bomber secures by a "direction of
> intention" that any shedding of innocent blood that occurs is
> "accidental." I know a Catholic boy who was puzzled at
> being told by his schoolmaster that it was an *accident* that
> the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were there to be killed; in fact,
> however absurd it seems, such thoughts are common among priests who
> know that they are forbidden by the divine law to justify the direct
> killing of the innocent (WAM, 59).
> 



This teaching strikes Anscombe as quite absurd. She chalks this
misunderstanding up to "Cartesian" psychology, a
philosophy of psychology she works to oppose elsewhere.



A philosophical understanding of intention (and thus not just Catholic
doctrine) is needed to *show* that killing innocent people as a
means to ending a war (or whatever) *just is* intentionally
killing the innocent, despite whatever thoughts are running through
the mind of the killer at the time. Thus she argues for a proper
understanding of Aquinas's idea that it matters whether some
action's effect is intended or merely foreseen, something we
must grasp if we are to see what motivates the Principle or Doctrine
of Double Effect (See SEP entry for more about the pros and cons of
the Doctrine of Double Effect). Anscombe does not so much argue for
the principle, as insist that it has not been adequately understood.
So to defend the Principle of Double Effect, a principle of ethics, we
first need a sound understanding of the concepts of action and of
intention. More on this in Section 4.



We will see the same need to understand the concepts of action and
intention by studying her most well-known paper, "Modern Moral
Philosophy" (MMP). There Anscombe presses three theses. First,
doing moral philosophy is useless, and will remain so until we have an
adequate philosophy of psychology, which is a long way away. Second,
moral philosophers in any case should abandon the concepts of moral
obligation, moral duty, and the moral "ought", for these
concepts make sense only in several conceptions of ethics none of
which generally survives. Third, there are no important differences
among the well-known English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onwards.
Each of Anscombe's three theses is bold; taken together, they
are shocking.



We will start with her last thesis. Anscombe notes that despite their
many differences, "every one of the best known English academic
moral philosophers" thinks that killing the innocent is
sometimes right, such as when the foreseeable consequences of
*not* killing them would be catastrophic. She traces this to
Sidgwick's definition of intention, according to which one
intends *any and every* foreseen consequence of one's
voluntary action. While the moral philosophers she criticizes
don't necessarily accept Sidgwick's definition of
intention, they do accept an ethical thesis based upon it: a person is
always equally *responsible* for the intended and the merely
foreseeable consequences of their voluntary actions. Anscombe
identifies *this* move as the difference between the
Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, who rejected the thought that it
could ever be apt to calculate whether to kill an innocent person, and
the *consequentialism* (a term she invented) of later English
philosophers. Consequentialism, as she explains, is not directly a
doctrine about what makes an action right - this meaning came
about only later in the recent history of philosophy. Instead,
consequentialism is about what one is responsible for. But the two
topics are connected: if you are equally responsible for intentionally
killing innocent people and for merely foreseeably killing innocent
people, then why would it be wrong to kill one innocent person to save
five? For if you don't, you'd be just as responsible for
the death of the five as if you had killed them yourself. Thus even
many deontologists (like W.D. Ross) agree with Sidgwick that in some
circumstances you have a moral duty to kill innocent people. (See also
MTD, 71.) But Anscombe instead held that the consequentialist view of
responsibility ultimately rests on a false view of what it is to act
intentionally.



Here and elsewhere, MMP touched a nerve with the philosophers she
targeted. One reason for this was the rather dismissive tone she took
in some of her criticisms. Another is her rich use of irony. In
addition to criticizing her contemporaries, she brusquely and perhaps
uncharitably attacks Butler, Hume, Kant, Bentham, and Mill. One might
sometimes guess that Anscombe is complaining about her colleagues
because they favor new radical ideas, preferring philosophy that
leaves everything in its place. But in fact she criticizes them on the
grounds that the standards from which they begin are, in practice, the
ones that happen to be current in their own society, and so modern
moral philosophers wind up being very conventional. This was also the
thrust of her BBC radio lecture "Does Oxford Moral Philosophy
Corrupt the Youth?", which she answered in the negative, on the
grounds that English culture was *already* corrupt, and
contemporary moral philosophy merely reflected rather than generated
or opposed this turpitude.



The second thesis of MMP is that moral philosophers ought to abandon
the concepts of *moral* obligation, *moral* duty,
*moral* "ought", and the like. (The generic
'ought' is fine.) These concepts, Anscombe argues, have a
point only in a law-based ethics: if a moral legislator (e.g. God)
commands you to do something, then you have a moral obligation or
moral duty to do it. But in forms of ethics not based upon such a
legislator, talk about moral obligation or moral duty is akin to those
arguing about what is criminal in a society lacking criminal law or
courts, or, alternatively, to castaways talking about whether their
clothing accords with the new company policy - the necessary
social framework for making such talk meaningful is absent. Unlike J.
L. Mackie, who thought that moral thought and talk was false, Anscombe
argued that it was nonsense, which is probably worse. She held that
ethicists would do better to classify actions instead as, say,
truthful or untruthful, just or unjust, ... rather than as
morally right or morally wrong.



Anscombe's thought here resembled that of her contemporaries
Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. All were opposed to Utilitarianism,
and were suspicious of its emphasis on 'thin' evaluative
terms. Our moral thought is far richer than that. Of course, their
criticism was not restricted to Utilitarianism. Any moral theory
predominantly employing thin moral concepts such as 'morally
right' and 'morally wrong' were subject to this
critique. Thin moral concepts are opposed to 'thick' ones.
Bernard Williams famously characterized thick concepts this way:



> 
> If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a
> reason for action ... We may say, summarily, that such concepts
> are "action-guiding." ... At the same time, their
> application is guided by the world. A concept of this sort may be
> rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree
> that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation .... We
> can say, then, that the application of these concepts is at the same
> time world-guided and action-guiding. (Williams, 1985, 140)
> 



To describe an action as 'cowardly' seems to provide much
more information than to describe it as 'wrong'. Further,
thin terms can lead us astray. In MMP, after describing the
Utilitarian commitment to be open, in principle, to "...
judicially punishing a man for what he is clearly understood not to
have done ...", which is clearly 'unjust', she
writes:



> 
> And here we see the superiority of the term 'unjust' over
> the terms 'morally right' and 'morally wrong'.
> For in the context of English moral philosophy since Sidgwick it
> appears legitimate to discuss whether it might be 'morally
> right' in some circumstances to adopt that procedure; but it
> cannot be argued that the procedure would in any circumstances be
> just. (MMP, 16)
> 



No doubt Anscombe's claims in MMP inspired some philosophers to
develop modern versions of what's now known as virtue ethics, a
theory designed to be a full-fledged alternative to Kantianism,
existentialism, utilitarianism, and other totalizing theories. But it
is crucially important to notice that Anscombe herself did not
advocate this development, and this brings us to the first thesis of
MMP: it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy
until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology. Even if it would
be in some ways "better" to theorize about ethics by using
virtue concepts such as 'truthful' or 'just',
rather than using concepts that now have no point, our efforts should
really be directed to the philosophy of psychology, and not to moral
philosophy *at all*. Even if we do know that some paths (e.g.
those which fixate on moral obligation) take us in the wrong
direction, we don't know which of the many remaining paths to
take.



What did she have in mind by 'philosophy of psychology'?
In MMP, she names several topics we would first need better
conceptions of: 'action', 'intention',
'pleasure', 'wanting', and maybe one day
'virtue' and 'flourishing'. She never
developed an adequate conception of virtue nor of flourishing, and so
she was never in a position even to *begin* doing moral
philosophy. But she did, of course, contribute to the development of
better conceptions of action and intention.



There is some controversy about whether Anscombe was being sincere in
arguing we should stop doing moral philosophy. Crisp 2004 suspected
that she was surreptitiously arguing for the superiority of a
God-based moral philosophy over *any* secular moral philosophy,
even one like Aristotle's. He worried that Anscombe's view
that moral philosophers should turn to issues in moral psychology
really applies only to those who deny divine law, and that Christians
like her can continue to do moral philosophy.



In a sense, Crisp is right. Anscombe did believe in a divine moral
law, and so must have thought that a theistic moral philosophy would
have advantages over any other. And Anscombe, of course, did have
views about how to live, had arguments for some of these views, and
repeatedly opposed the zeitgeist by, say, protesting the use of atomic
bombs and of abortion.



But when Anscombe said we (we secular or at least disunified
philosophers) should stop doing moral philosophy until we have an
adequate philosophy of psychology, she did not mean that we should
abandon all of our ethical thought and talk. This is for two reasons.
First, one need not think it's profitable to do moral philosophy
to have views about how to live or to coherently support or oppose
various actions. Her plea to stop doing moral *philosophy* does
not conflict with her having strong views about what to oppose, just
as one might have all kinds of views about what is and isn't
illegal even if one never does any legal *philosophy*. Echoing
Rousseau, you don't need to be a philosopher in order to oppose
(or support!) injustice.



Second, she did indeed think that some classes of action (e.g. murder)
were "absolutely excluded" (MTD 71) for what *we*
might call moral reasons. But most of her argumentative writings on
such topics were aimed at audiences who already shared her view that
one did not need the results of moral philosophy in order to live
well. In the preface to a posthumous collection of essays, Luke
Gormally explains that the bulk of her addresses in that volume were
delivered to Catholic audiences, where she assumed "acceptance
of authoritative Church teaching" [FHG, x]. If you and your
audience trust that God has promised each of you that it is in your
interest to avoid injustice, you don't need to deeply understand
the concept of flourishing or of virtue in order to talk to one
another about how to live. Compare: if you trust your travel agent
when she says that drinking alcohol on what appears to you to be a
stateless island is in fact illegal, then you don't need to do
political philosophy in order to talk with your fellow travelers about
whether to leave the alcohol at home.



Finally, as Aquinas exemplified, it's possible to think that
morality is based upon God and also believe that we need to understand
the nature of our psychology in order to adequately understand
morality. Her call to give moral philosophy a rest until we better
understand the philosophy of psychology was addressed to us all, not
just to a subset of moral philosophers.


## 3. Metaphysics



Some of Anscombe's most influential work was on the nature of
causation, a concept which is notoriously difficult to analyze. Part
of her motivation for working on causation was to understand human
freedom. Her paper "Causality and Determination" [CAD]
challenged some of the empiricist orthodoxy of Hume's account.
She is concerned to distinguish causality from determination, arguing
that one event can cause another even if the latter isn't
determined by its cause. When we note an event's cause, we note
from what it derived. She writes "Causality consists in the
derivativeness of an effect from its causes" (CAD, 136). But
that *Y* derives from *X* does not entail that
*X* necessitated *Y*. So, we need not assume that every
cause necessitates its effect. If causation always relates
*types* of events ("Whenever an *X*-like event
happens, a *Y*-like event happens"), then it might look
like a cause necessitates its effect. But she challenged the view that
the causal relation is actually characterized by constant conjunction
of types, and thus whether causation entails necessitation. Discussing
Feynman's Geiger counter case, she writes:



> 
> An example of a non-necessitating cause is mentioned by Feynman: a
> bomb is connected to a Geiger counter, so that it will go off if the
> Geiger counter registers a certain reading; whether it will or not is
> not determined, for it is so placed near some radioactive material
> that it may or may not register that reading. (CAD, 145)
> 



And yet, if the bomb explodes it was caused by the Geiger counter
arrangement. Causation thus does not involve determination or
necessity. Since the radioactive decay was not sufficient for this
effect, the case tells against viewing causes as sufficient
conditions. There need be no general connection between cause and
effect. This challenge to the Humean account would turn out to be very
influential - it helped push philosophers towards the
development of probabilistic accounts of causation to account for the
above type of case.



Instead, Anscombe was a singularist about causation, since she further
rejected the Humean view that causation is not observable in a single
instance. In her view, some perceivable events are themselves
instances of causation. Anscombe produced examples from ordinary
language that seem to show that we do perceive causation. Such
examples are abundant. "I saw her clean the dishes"
reports the perception of a causal process.



She was also an indeterminist about freedom of action. Actions are
mostly physical movements, and "if these physical movements are
physically predetermined by processes which I do not control, then my
freedom is perfectly illusory" (CAD, 146). Our actions are
surely caused, but not determined, and so there is still room for
freedom. Yet she also recognized that indeterminism does not suffice
for freedom; more is needed to establish that. We will need to
understand what more is needed when we discuss her views about
action.



In her paper "The First Person" [TFP], originally
published in 1975, Anscombe argues for a thesis that seems patently
false: the word "I" is not a referring expression. That
is, while the function of a term like "Elizabeth
Anscombe", or "the daughter of Allen Anscombe", or
"*that* woman", or "she" is
referential, the term "I" does not function in the same
way. "I" thus refers to nothing at all. (Compare with the
use of 'It' in the thought "It is snowing.")
"The First Person" is probably Anscombe's most
difficult article - which is saying something - and even
sympathetic scholars disagree about what the argument is supposed to
be. She was clearly influenced by Geach 1957, and by
Castenada's various papers on the first person. Later,
Lewis 1979 discussed this issue in a distinct but by then familiar
way.



Anscombe focuses approvingly on some aspects of Descartes' use
of 'I' in the *Meditations*. Famously, he cannot
doubt 'I exist.' But on the same grounds that he can doubt
'I have a body', he also can doubt 'I am
Descartes.' After all, 'Descartes' is just the name
of a human being, and he can doubt that he is any human being
whatsoever - he can wonder whether he's instead a brain in
a vat. So, if the argument indeed establishes the non-identity of
himself with this body, it likewise establishes the non-identity of
himself with Descartes!



This may seem strange, for this last thought may seem equivalent to
"Descartes was not Descartes", and *that*
can't be coherently denied. But Anscombe argues that these two
thoughts are not equivalent. Why's that?



We do *tend* to think of 'I' as simply being that
expression people use to refer to themselves. However,



> 
> "When John Smith spoke of James Robinson he was speaking of his
> brother, but he did not know this." That's a possible
> situation. So similarly is "When John Smith spoke of John
> Horatio Auberon Smith (named in a will perhaps) he was speaking of
> himself, but he did not know this." If so, then 'speaking
> of' or 'referring to' oneself is compatible with not
> knowing that the object one speaks of is oneself. (TFP, 47)
> 



We might then wish to say "Smith can speak of himself without
realizing that he is speaking of *himself*." This shows
that there are two distinct kinds of reflexive pronouns: the ordinary
reflexive pronoun and the indirect reflexive pronouns. The first
occurrence of 'himself' immediately above is the ordinary
reflexive pronoun, and it refers successfully just in case it picks
out the same object as its antecedent. It doesn't matter
*how* it does so, nor must the antecedent and pronoun share a
sense. When above we say "Smith spoke of himself", we are
using the ordinary reflexive pronoun, for the person to whom Smith
thereby referred was indeed the person who spoke.



Things are different if we are tempted to say "The word
'I' is a word each of us uses in speaking of
himself." *This* use of 'himself' can't
be the ordinary reflexive, because, as we just saw, a person can speak
of himself in cases where he wouldn't also use the word
'I' to refer to the same thing. The word
'himself' in this newer attempt at explaining the word
'I' gets its distinctive sense *from* that of the
word 'I'. But since the sense of the indirect reflexive
pronoun 'himself' *depends* upon that of the word
'I', we cannot use the indirect reflexive pronoun, as
though we understand it independently, to *explain* the word
'I'. Things instead are the other way around. This
discussion displays the problem that 'I' poses, but it
doesn't solve it.



How *do* we solve it? Anscombe thinks you can't. In the
bulk of the paper, Anscombe argues that the word 'I'
isn't a referring expression in a few steps. First, she argues
that 'I' isn't like other referring expressions:
proper names, other pronouns, demonstratives, definite descriptions,
and so on. So we can't assimilate the use of the word
"I" to other more tractable types of referring
expressions. Second, she argues that the only remaining possibility is
that the word "I" refers to an immaterial substance (a
Cartesian ego), or at least a stretch of such a substance that exists
so long as one is thinking a thought. But that would still leave us no
way to identify the same referent in different
"I"-thoughts at different times, an
"intolerable" result. Moreover, Anscombe explicitly denied
that there are immaterial substances. She described the very
conception of an immaterial substance as "a delusive one"
(IOS, 71).



So, having ruled out all the standard ways that terms refer, she
concludes that the function of the word 'I' is
non-referential. She says little about what its function *is*,
although she notes that the word is dispensable - a language
whose verbs are conjugated to reflect what we call 'the first
person' (e.g. Latin, Spanish) can do without such a word. Her
conclusion could be resisted if one produced a way of referring she
hadn't considered, or if one rebutted any of her arguments
against the possibilities she does consider. Important discussions of
this paper can be found in Doyle 2018, O'Brien 1994, and many
other places, and it has clearly inspired the work of Rodl
2007.


## 4. Action Theory



Anscombe's *Intention* is one of the classics of 20th
century philosophy. Indeed, it continues to be a standard point of
reference for those working in action theory and philosophical
psychology, so much so that contemporary theories of action are often
categorized as either Anscombean or Davidsonian.



On its back cover, David Velleman aptly quips that *Intention*
is "often quoted, sometimes read, rarely understood". Many
readers are indeed puzzled by the significance and the lessons of what
she writes. *Intention* is a work on the nature of agency
through an understanding of the concept of intention. As we saw above,
Anscombe wrote *Intention* after opposing supporters of
Truman:



> 
> Perplexed by defenders of Truman she came to the conclusion that they
> had failed to understand the nature of his actions, and it was this
> that led her to write *Intention*, in which she pointed out
> that in doing one thing (moving one's hand) one may
> intentionally be doing another (directing the death of human beings).
> (Haldane 2000, 1020)
> 



Indeed we have seen many points in her work in moral philosophy where
she calls us to understand the concepts of action and of intention
better.



The best way to understand the argument of the book might be to
consider its claims in a different order than the way the book lays
them out. For the actual narrative of the books deliberately leads the
reader into a bunch of dead ends and incomplete solutions before
forwarding specific positive claims.



In what might reasonably be considered to be the conclusion of the
book's argument, she writes that "the term
'intentional' has reference to a *form* of
description of events" (INT, 84). To unpack this cryptic
thought, note first that the events she has in mind are some of those
that we human beings are the subject of. It does not pick out things
that merely happen to us.



Second, note that a single action can be described in various ways. Is
he moving his arm up and down? Pumping water? Doing his job? Clicking
out a steady rhythm? Making a funny shadow on the rock behind him?
Well, it could be that *all* of these descriptions are
true.



Third, note that even if the same action can be described in multiple
ways, it usually won't be intentional in every one of those ways
described. For example, even though a man is pumping water
intentionally, he might not be making a funny shadow on the rock
behind him intentionally. But what determines which of the
descriptions of his action are indeed intentional?



At first, Anscombe answers this disjunctively: she identifies several
cases which are *not* intentional, and several other cases that
are. If you ask someone "Why are you doing that?", and
they give one of a few types of answers, this establishes that the
action is not intentional. Such ways of answering can include 1)
"I didn't know I was doing that.", 2) "I
(merely) observed/inferred that I was doing that", 3) "I
(merely) observed/inferred how my physical movement was caused."
By contrast, the following answers show that the action so described
is indeed intentional: 1) an answer that mentions something future
("To end the war"), 2) an answer that interprets it
("Out of curiosity") , 3) an answer that mentions
something past that's given as the ground for something good or
bad for the person at whom it is aimed ("They attacked us
first"), or, finally, 4) "No reason" (INT, 24).



Such a hodgepodge of answers sheds little light upon the concept of
intention, her quarry. Thus, she shifts methods. She emphasizes that
in every case of doing something intentionally, you don't need
to observe yourself in order to know that that's what you are up
to. For example, you know that you are reading this encyclopedia
entry, and you know this not because somebody told you, nor did you
merely infer it, nor did you see yourself in a mirror reading it.
Rather, you know it in some distinctive way, what later writers will
call a 'first-personal' way. Anscombe calls this knowledge
of one's own intentional actions "practical
knowledge", which is likewise obscure. But she concludes that
"the notion of 'practical knowledge' can only be
understood if we first understand 'practical
reasoning'" (INT, 57). Thus it is only by grasping what it
is to reason practically that we will understand what practical
knowledge and the concept of intention are.



What, then, is practical reasoning? There are two ways to think about
it. One familiar way is via deliberation: we have some end, and we
reason to some sufficient means to that end. Aristotle sketched things
this way. Anscombe focuses on another way (although it winds up being
equivalent to the first). She notes that the various ways to describe
what someone does can bear a particular *order* to one another.
A man might be moving his arm up and down *because* (and not
just, and) he is operating the pump, which he's doing because
(and not just, and) he's pumping water to the house, and so on.
This is an order that really exists among events; it's not
merely the sum of merely physically described events going on in the
world and, also somehow, what's going on in his head.
*This* order is the order of intention.



Of course, the man himself is in a special position to grasp this
actually-existing order among the ways of describing what he's
doing. Anscombe compared this knowledge to the knowledge had by a man
who directs a project like the erection of a building simply by giving
orders for every little thing that anyone does, a project which he
can't see and gets no reports on. If all goes well, the director
knows what's done, and his knowledge is practical knowledge. His
practical knowledge is his grasping the order of the events that
unfold. Practical knowledge, then, isn't fundamentally knowledge
of certain atomic actions, e.g. thinking of a number, blinking.
It's knowledge of the entire means-end order among the things
one does, an order which of course *includes* the actions
constituting it. The man in the earlier example can say
"I'm moving my arm up and down" *because* he
can say "I'm moving my arm up and down because I'm
pumping water".



Indeed, many of the very concepts we use to describe movements
involving human beings - e.g. 'greeting',
'hiring', 'sending for', even
'offending', 'dropping', 'placing'
- are concepts we'd lack were we to lack the concept of
intention. So the term 'intentional' refers not only to
the aforementioned 'because' and what it structures, but
to the very terms by which we conceptualize most human and animal
movement. Intention is thus not something 'added' on to
mere behavior we somehow first separately conceptualize. Rather, the
order of intention is baked into the ways we represent our lives from
the very start.



There are a wealth of other sections from *Intention* that have
been "often quoted" and yet "rarely
understood". Consider, for example, this famous passage:



> 
> Let us consider a man going round a town with a shopping list in his
> hand. Now it is clear that the relation of this list to the things he
> actually buys is one and the same whether his wife gave him the list
> or it is his own list; and that there is a different relation where a
> list is made by a detective following him about. If he made the list
> itself, it was an expression of intention; if his wife gave it to him,
> it has the role of an order. What then is the identical relation to
> what happens, in the order and the intention, which is not shared by
> the record? It is precisely this: if the list and the things that the
> man actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes
> a mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man's
> performance (if his wife were to say: "Look, it says butter and
> you have bought margarine", he would hardly reply: "What a
> mistake! we must put that right" and alter the word on the list
> to "margarine"); whereas if the detective's record
> and what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in
> the record. (INT, 56).
> 



Anscombe draws attention to the fact that when there is a discrepancy
between a piece of paper and what happens, the source of the error
depends upon the "role" of the paper. If the paper has the
role of a record, the error is in the paper. But if the paper has the
role of an order or intention, the error is in what happens. Thus
there can be *two* ways to fail to know what happens: by
misrecording, and by misperforming. And one who practically knows
doesn't misperform.



Beginning with Searle (1975), a different thesis gets very widely
attributed to Anscombe in the literature: one about 'mental
states' like beliefs and desires, each of which supposedly has a
different "direction of fit". Anscombe, however, says
nothing here about believing or desiring or other kinds of mental
states; the example instead displays two *ways of knowing*. Her
point is that you can know something either by believing something
that is (already) true, or by intentionally doing something. Both are
forms of knowledge, and indeed there can be two ways to know one and
the same thing. (See Frost 2014.)



Anscombe applied her views on intention to clarify her own positions
on controversial claims, such as the condemnation of contraception.
One puzzle in the Catholic doctrine condemning contraception, and yet
allowing for the 'rhythm method' of avoiding pregnancy, is
to reconcile the rationales in a consistent way. Many charged the
Church with inconsistency, since the intention to not get pregnant
during intercourse is present in both cases. Anscombe claims there is
an important difference:



> 
> The reason why people are confused about intention, and why they
> sometimes think there is no difference between contraceptive
> intercourse and the use of infertile times to avoid conception, is
> this: They don't notice the difference between
> "intention" when it means the intentionalness of the thing
> you're doing - that you're doing *this* on
> purpose - and when it means a *further* or
> *accompanying* intention *with* which you do the thing.
> (CAC, 182)
> 



Her claim is that the further intentions that accompany these actions
may be the same, but there is a significant difference between the
acts themselves. Her claim is that contraceptive intercourse, unlike
timing intercourse to coincide with infertile periods, is a bad sort
of action because in the case of contraceptive intercourse
"...to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act
at all, whether or not we're married" (CAC, 183). Having
intercourse that has purposely been rendered infertile is itself a
different act from having intercourse at an infertile time. Even
though both types of action may have the further aim of, for example,
limiting family size, the acts themselves differ. The
"perversion of the sex act in marriage is, in this one way, like
writing a forged check for a good cause", she claims. The
further intention of, let's say, helping the needy is a worthy
one but does not vindicate the action of forging the check.



Needless to say, this view was controversial. Bernard Williams and
Michael Tanner criticized her argument for failing to consider one of
her own theses - that actions, including sorts of actions, can
fall under a variety of descriptions. On their view, she is picking
and choosing descriptions of actions in order to get the outcome she
wants - a distinction between the rhythm method and
contraception that isn't just a trivial distinction. But, they
argue, she cannot do this convincingly. They argue that couples who
employ the rhythm method are taking steps to achieve infertility just
as those who take contraception are. Those steps are central to
understanding the acts themselves, not simply the further purpose of
the acts. (Williams and Tanner 1972)


## 5. Philosophy of Perception



What is it that we perceive? The world? Or only our ideas or
sense-data? Something else? Anscombe deployed some of the conceptual
machinery she had developed in the philosophy of action to topics in
the philosophy of sense-perception. Three relevant theses from the
philosophy of action include:


1. Not any true description of what you do is an intentional action.
("She tripped over the rug")
2. The descriptions of what you intentionally do can be vague.
("I'm intentionally eating some jelly beans - but
I'm not intentionally eating some specific number of
them.")
3. When you make a mistake, you might not do what you intend.
("He intended to unlock the door, but he mistakenly broke the
knob.")



As we will see shortly, analogous claims can be made about sensation
or perception.



But first, note that Anscombe distinguished sharply between two senses
of the word "object" - one of which is material
("There are ten objects on the bowling lane"), while the
other is intentional ("Immortality was the object of his
desire"), which otherwise needn't exist at all. An
intentional object is given by a word or phrase which gives a
*description under which* it is such (IOS, 9). She insists that
neither sense of the word "object" is deviant nor
philosophically uninteresting, but they are easily confused with each
other.



She makes a foray into grammatical theory to illustrate the
possibility of this distinction between senses of
"object". Consider the sentence "Luke gave Leia his
lightsaber". If asked "What object did Luke give
Leia?", we would reply "his lightsaber". And if
asked for the direct object of the sentence, we would again reply
"his lightsaber". But although "his
lightsaber" is indeed the direct object of the sentence, Luke
did not give Leia a direct object; to think otherwise is to confuse
the two senses. Moreover, "his lightsaber" is the direct
object of this sentence, even though no lightsaber materially exists.
It would be foolish to object to the claim that the direct object of
the sentence is "his lightsaber" on the grounds that
lightsabers aren't real. Anscombe's insight is that
likewise there are also objects of perception in both a material and
an intentional sense.



In light of the three claims above, Anscombe makes three analogous
claims about sense-perception:


1. Not any true description of what you perceive is the intentional
object of what you perceive. For example, what you see might be a
picture of a duck-rabbit drawn by the Queen, but you might not see it
as a picture of a duck-rabbit, nor as a picture drawn by the Queen
- you happen to see only a picture of a duck, the intentional
object of sight.
2. You might perceive something vaguely. For example, although the
tree you see has 125 leaves (material object), you see only a tree
with an indeterminate number of leaves (intentional object).
3. You can perceive something that doesn't materially exist.
For example, after rubbing your eyes you might see stars (intentional
object), even though materially there are no stars to be seen.



Anscombe maintained that certain philosophical views look inescapable
only if we conflate these two distinct senses. Idealism is the view
that we see only sense data, taking what is the intentional object of
perception also to be the material objection of perception. On the
other hand, direct realism (or what she calls 'ordinary language
philosophy') holds that we see only material objects without any
intermediaries, overlooking or dismissing the legitimate use of saying
things like "Now I see stars" after getting hit on the
head. They thereby ignore or misunderstand the relevance of the
intentional sense of sense-perception. Thus neither idealism nor
direct realism recognizes the importance of the distinction between
two ways of thinking about verbs of sense-perception. Both views thus
fail to recognize the distinct intentionality of sensation.



Although these two senses are distinct, Anscombe notes that sometimes
people use the word "see" and other verbs of
sense-perception without definitely intending it either only
materially or only intentionally. Only further questioning would nudge
them to make their meaning more specific.


## 6. Testimony



Among the very many topics Anscombe worked on, her ideas about the
role of testimony have prefigured or influenced much contemporary
thought on the topic. We will summarize three of her short but
important papers on testimony: "Hume and Julius Caesar"
(HJC), "What Is It to Believe Someone?" (WBS), and
"Authority in Morals" (AIM), each of which heralds ideas
that gained prominence in philosophy only later.



In HJC, she considers Hume's answer to the question, how do we
know about historical events? For example, how do we know that Caesar
was killed on the Ides of March? How do we even know that Caesar was a
real man, and not a mythical figure like Electra? Hume's answer
was essentially that you perceive or remember someone (perhaps your
school teacher) telling you about Caesar, and you next infer the cause
of that - namely, that someone told them - and so on,
until you infer that there were eyewitnesses in the Senate, who then
witnessed Caesar's death. You thus infer the original event
through a series of causes terminating in something you perceive or
remember perceiving.



Anscombe argued that Hume's answer cannot be right. First, is it
really true that we infer that Caesar was killed on the Ides of March
*from* the thought there were many observant people in the
Senate that day? No. If anything, it's the other way around:
*given* that we think that Caesar was killed then and there, we
infer that there must have been eyewitnesses to his death. It is not
that we first establish the presence of these people, and only then
infer what caused them to say what they said.



Anscombe also discussed "one of the rare pieces of stupidity in
the writings of Wittgenstein" (HJC, 89). He once wrote that if
we were to find a piece of writing saying Caesar never existed, and
was invented for other ends, this would be some evidence that Caesar
never existed. Anscombe pushes us to think further about this. If we
were to discover such a document, we would instead immediately
conclude it to be worthless, this because it conflicts with so much we
have been taught about the history of the West. She thus opposed the
idea that our belief in Caesar's existence rests upon any
*evidence* we have for it, rather than from our directly
trusting what we have been taught. A coherentist might reply that any
document alleging Caesar's nonexistence clashes with the
preponderance of historical evidence we have about him, and that we
can check the claims of this document against these other sources of
evidence. But Anscombe rejoins that these other sources of
"evidence" are themselves historians who straightforwardly
believe much of what they have been taught, and we believe them. Thus,
we cannot "reduce" testimony to some other source of
justification. Believing testimony is basic.



She provocatively concludes the essay



> 
> [N]ot everything can be put up for checking. Von Neurath's image
> of the ship which we repair - and, I suppose, build on to
> - while it is afloat: if this suggests that we can go round
> tapping every plank for rottenness, and so we might end up with a
> wholly different ship, the analogy is not good. For there are things
> that are on a level. A general epistemological reason for doubting one
> will be a reason for doubting all, and then none of them would have
> anything to test it(HJC, 92)
> 



She thus opposes epistemological coherentism about justification, or
at least a certain popular version of it. The many sources of
information about Caesar's life are themselves equally
vulnerable to skepticism, and so we cannot actually test the former
while trusting the latter. Without trusting what we have been taught,
we have almost no historical knowledge.



Well before C. A. J. Coady's masterful monograph on testimony
(1992) that revived widespread interest in the topic, Anscombe
published a little essay titled "What Is It to Believe
Someone?", anticipating many points he and others later
developed. She wrote that the topic of believing someone is not merely
neglected but actually unknown in the philosophical discussion of her
time. Yet she avers that it is "of great importance in
philosophy and in life", for "the greater part of our
knowledge of reality rests upon the belief that we repose in things we
have been taught and told". What is it, then, for a
*person*, rather than a proposition, to be the object of
belief?



Anscombe distinguishes believing a person from believing what a person
says, for you can do the latter without the former - both when
you already believe what is said, and when you believe that the person
is both misinformed and yet trying to deceive you. Anscombe describes
many "presuppositions" to believing someone: noticing the
relevant sound or inscription, understanding it as an attempt to
communicate, noticing that it is addressed to oneself, understanding
it properly, understanding that it was produced by the person indeed
producing it, and many more. Only once all these are in place do we
come to the situation where we can ask: "Does he believe
her?"



It is no small matter whether people trust you when you tell them
things. Anscombe claimed "It is an insult and it may be an
injury not to be believed" (WBS, 9). Although she does not
elaborate upon the nature of the insult and injury, her claim
foreshadows contemporary discussions of epistemic injustice.
Interestingly, it can be insulting, she notes, not even to be
*heard* as telling one something. For example, if you tell me
*p*, but I fail to note that you were telling me anything
- perhaps I thought you were just venting aloud - you
might reasonably say that I disrespectfully failed to believe you. We
can wrong one another by refusing to accept one another's word,
an idea that has recently become widely discussed at the intersection
of epistemology and ethics.



In the third paper on testimony, "Authority in Morals",
Anscombe again considers a few related questions that only recently
have become widely discussed: can one person aptly tell another what
to think about morality, and can the hearer aptly trust what they are
thus told? Given that the paper was originally presented at a
conference in an abbey, much of her discussion involves trusting a
religious authority about moral truths. But her points generalize.



Anscombe compares moral teaching to mathematical teaching: in both
cases, one must *do* something to truly learn what is being
taught, rather than merely accepting something as to be believed.
Teaching someone either morality or mathematics thus won't just
involve the formation of belief. Even so, she denies that a proper
understanding of autonomy is incompatible with trusting moral
testimony: deciding to trust someone who tells you about a bit of
moral truth can be *a way of* thinking for oneself. A man who
does this and acts on this testimony is still "his own
pilot" (AIM, 49).



Yet there are limits to moral testimony. Although she thinks certain
dogmatic truths are religiously revealed and could not otherwise be
known, this is not so for moral truths. Moral truths may be
religiously revealed only *per accidens*. In other words, moral
truths *can* always be known other than by trusting some
source. There seems to be no room for moral truths that *per
se* can be taken only through trust.



One way moral truths can be revealed *per accidens* is when
someone relies on an authority for a moral claim that they in some
sense could have thought out for themselves, but didn't.
Anscombe does not imply that so relying need be a sign of laziness;
rather, she thinks that different people have already grasped
different parts of the moral law (AIM, 45), and so seems to think that
sharing moral truths is much like sharing other truths. For example,
if you tell me what you ate for lunch, I can reasonably trust you even
if in principle it's true that I could have instead spied on you
to find out. Likewise, I might reasonably believe you when you tell me
some moral truth that I hadn't worked out for myself (but, in
theory, could).



The second way moral truths can be revealed *per accidens* is
when their factual grounds are knowable only by religious revelation.
For example, consider the ascetic life. As Hume noted, there seems to
be nothing good about it. And so if someone were to tell you that it
is indeed good, there would be no question of believing them.



But now suppose you come to accept certain ordinary (non-moral) truths
of revealed religion: the doctrine of original sin, and the
possibility of joining your suffering with that of Christ. Now in
light of accepting these ideas, it becomes possible to see for
yourself that there is indeed something good about the ascetic life.
So, you need not accept this moral claim itself on the basis of
religious revelation, but you accept it on the basis of other truths
*themselves* accepted as revelation. Moral truths, however,
always can in principle be graspable without needing to trust another.
Even though there need be nothing bad about trusting an authority who
teaches about morality, their teachings, if true, *could* be
arrived at otherwise.


## 7. Conclusion



G. E. M. Anscombe's work ranged over many years and many
different areas in philosophy. The breadth of her work is impressive.
She was systematic in her thinking, seeing and developing connections
between metaphysics, moral psychology, and ethics that exhibited not
simply a grasp of one particular problem, but a world view. Much of
her works remains unpublished, although newly accessible through the
Anscombe Papers Project at the Collegium Institute for Catholic
Thought & Culture. Anscombe's legacy is one of the broadest
and deepest left by a 20th century philosopher.