Elizabeth Anscombe

Elizabeth Anscombe was the student who carried Wittgenstein's later philosophy into English and then used its methods to build something entirely her own. She came to Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1942, attended his classes, became one of his closest friends and, after his death in 1951, one of his three literary executors, with Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright.

What she took from Wittgenstein

Above all she took a way of working: distrust the picture a philosopher brings to a question, and look hard at how the words are actually used. Her translation of the Philosophical Investigations (1953) shaped how generations of English readers met the book, and she translated or co-edited many of the posthumous works, including On Certainty with von Wright. Her Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959) insisted, against the logical positivists, that the Tractatus has to be read through Frege, not through the Vienna Circle.

What she did with it

Intention (1957) applies Wittgenstein's patience to a question he never treated systematically: what makes an action intentional? Anscombe starts from an ordinary question, "Why are you doing that?" An action is intentional when that question, in a certain sense, applies to it. And one and the same movement can be intentional under one description and not under another. Her example is a man who is at once moving his arm up and down, operating a pump, replenishing a house's water supply and poisoning its inhabitants. That short book more or less founded the modern philosophy of action.

In "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) she argued that ethics should wait until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, that the special "moral ought" is a leftover of a law-based ethics that has forgotten its lawgiver, and she coined the word "consequentialism". The essay is widely credited with reviving virtue ethics. "The First Person" (1975) defended the startling claim that "I" is not a referring expression at all.

Where she parts company with him

Anscombe was a convinced Catholic who defended moral absolutes: some acts, such as deliberately killing the innocent, may never be done, whatever the consequences. She developed the doctrine of double effect through her theory of intention, and in 1956 she publicly opposed Oxford's honorary degree for President Truman because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wittgenstein, by contrast, held that ethics cannot be put into propositions, as his Lecture on Ethics shows, and he was wary of any theory of what we ought to do.

She also did metaphysics, on causation, truth and the soul, with an Aristotelian appetite he might well have treated as a symptom. From 1970 to 1986 she held the Cambridge chair that had once been his. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy rightly calls her fiercely independent, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces how widely her work reached: his student in method, entirely her own in doctrine.