In Our Time - Elizabeth Anscombe

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

In 1956 Oxford University awarded an honorary degree to the former US president Harry S. Truman for his role in ending the Second World War. One philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919 – 2001), objected strongly. She argued that although dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have ended the fighting, it amounted to the murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. It was therefore an irredeemably immoral act. And there was something fundamentally wrong with a moral philosophy that didn’t see that. This was the starting point for a body of work that changed the terms in which philosophers discussed moral and ethical questions in the second half of the twentieth century. A leading student of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anscombe combined his insights with rejuvenated interpretations of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that made these ancient figures speak to modern issues and concerns. Anscombe was also instrumental in making action, and the question of what it means to intend to do something, a leading area of philosophical work. With Rachael Wiseman, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of LiverpoolConstantine Sandis, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, and Director of Lex Academic Roger Teichmann, Lecturer in Philosophy at St Hilda’s College, University of OxfordProducer: Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, in 1956, Oxford University awarded an honorary degree to the former US President Harry S. Truman for his role in ending the Second World War. One philosopher, Elizabeth Anscom, objected strongly.

She argued that although dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have ended the fighting, it amounted to the murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. It was therefore an irredeemable immoral act, and there was something fundamentally wrong with the moral philosophy that didn't see that. This was the starting point from bodywork that changed the terms in which philosophers discussed moral and ethical questions

in the second half of the 20th century. Anscom was also instrumental in making action, and the question of what it means to intend to do something, a leading area of philosophical work. With me to discuss Elizabeth Anscombe and Rachel Wiseman, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Liverpool, Constantine Sandys, visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire,

and director of Lex Academic, and Roger Teichmann, lecture in philosophy at St. Hilda's College University of Oxford. Roger, can you tell us about Anscom's early life, family background, and education? Yes, sure. So, Ascombe was Elizabeth Anskim or Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anskam in full. Her father was Alan Wells Anskam. He was a soldier.

Her mother, Gertrude Elizabeth, Ney Thomas was a teacher. Elizabeth was born in 1919 in Limerick in Ireland because her father was posted there. But the posting didn't last very long and the family moved back to England when Elizabeth was still an infant. She had two brothers who, one of the first. whom she was very fond of, but who died actually in action in the Second World War. The other became an Anglican vicar. So one question that, of course, you want to ask about any philosophers how they first got the bug, how they first got bitten. Anscom got bitten. She did a lot of independent reading as a teenager, and in particular read books about religion and theology, and two

books in particular by Jesuits, a 19th century Jesuit called Bernard Berda and the famous Martin Darcy, the 20th century Jesuit. She read these books and found herself disagreeing with certain arguments and claims made in them without realizing that the topics of these disagreements were in fact philosophical. She hadn't come across philosophy. She just wanted to argue with the author, argue with the text, and only later realized, oh, those were philosophical. This. So, for example, a proof for the existence of God given in one of the books struck her, she was 14 or something, struck her as a failure, a flawed proof. And instead of just sighing, throwing the book in the corner or turning the page, she felt impelled to go off and try and do a better version to plug the holes in the argument. And she later recalled several attempts, unsuccessful attempts, to make this argument work.

But that was, according to her, how she first got the philosophical bug. So against her parents' wishes She converted to Catholicism That she went against their wishes And he influenced the rest of her career And being a Catholic That's right So reading those books in her teens

As well as bringing her to philosophy You might say Took her away from her parents Anglican faith and towards Rome And they were pretty alarmed by this They even got a local vicar around To try and dissuade their daughter From this perilous path

She didn't budge She didn't budge No she sent the vicar away with the flea in his ear More or less On the topic of Transcendant substantiation. It seemed to have been a very determined young girl. Yes, this is an early instance of a toughness of character,

which is completely characteristic of her. Thank you. Constantine Sandys. In 1942, Anscombe went to Cambridge to study under the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Who was he? And what was he working out when she encountered him? It was quite a strange time in Wittgenstein's life, though there have been many strange times in his life, I suppose. She'd already read his first book, The Tractatus,

the only one published in his lifetime and then went to study with him. But this was during war, and Wittgenstein sort of disapproved of people just carrying on with philosophy during wartime. So he was at a guy's hospital, working as a porter kind of incognito at that time, but still giving philosophy lectures

I think every other weekend in Cambridge. And he was at that point doing philosophy of mathematics in particular. His first work had really been about logic and how mind and world relate and was quite systematic in some ways. But he was moving away from that, moving away from the very book that had inspired Anscombe. And in 42, he was doing this philosophy of mathematics by 44 when he's back at Cambridge delivering lectures. He's really doing philosophical psychology, which came to influence Anscombe quite a lot. In fact, she translated both his works on maths and philosophical psychology down the line.

But this is the kind of mid-late period in Wittgenstein's life where he's moved away from the ideas of the tractatus, which are very formal and quite strict. And he's interested in how ordinary ways of speaking, how concepts are related to our practices and everyday life. And this is something that the context in which a word has meaning is very important to Anscom's own philosophy. His reputation was enormous. What effect did he have personally and philosophically on Anscom? His reputation was huge. I mean, personally, they became very good friends. All you need to know is she's buried next to him

and was there on his final day when he died. There are times, I think, when she went to see him, when she was having a sort of personal crisis and went and stayed with him for a few days, and we don't know exactly what happened, but that's how important he was to her personal. there are places where she sort of says, you know, she was so close to him and yet didn't really fully understand him. So he was a kind of enigma to her in some ways, I think.

But what does she take from him philosophically? Philosophically, her two huge influences are Wittgenstein on the one hand and Thomas Aquinas on the other. Sorry, the Middle Ages, saint scholar who, as it were, transferred Aristotle into Christianity. That's right. And Aristotle is also a very important figure for Anscombe. She's her own philosopher. She's not just taking views from these people, but Wittgenstein certainly influenced, I guess a number of ways. One, in terms of topic, her interest in philosophical psychology, her interest in intention and philosophy of action comes from things in the philosophical investigations, which she translated and was published posthumously.

But also what I was speaking about before in relation to the life that concepts have and how they relate to our practices and the ordinary use of words as opposed to philosophical uses is very important. So when she looks at intention, for example, she is doing a kind of conceptual analysis, but she's interested in looking at what it means to say someone did something intentionally. And even stylistically, if you look at the way intention, one of her main books is written, which will be coming to. Which will be coming to. There are similarities there with Wittgenstein. We might talk about those, no matter.

He taught her a lot. Did she teach him anything? I'm sure she taught him a lot. He clearly was particularly fond of her. There's evidence to suggest Wittgenstein was not that keen on female philosophers, but he affectionately referred to Anskam as old man or old boy or something like that. And sometimes when the women had left the room, and Anscombe was still there, he'd say,

it's just us men now or something like that. So it's maybe showing not the best side of Wittgenstein, but it also shows his affection for Anskine. Vichstein doesn't tolerate fools. So if she's there, he's learning a lot from her. Thank you. Rachel Wiseman, beyond Wittgenstein's circle, moral philosophy in the 1940s,

was dominated by the non-cognitivism under the influence of A.J. Air. What was it non-cognitism? Just before the war, so 1936, just before Ranscom arrived as a student at Oxford University, AJ Air published a book called Language, Truth and Logic. And in it he sort of set out a manifesto. He was only a young man at the time, a manifesto to sort of destroy philosophy. That was what he wanted to do, and particularly destroy metaphysics.

And it caused a real ruckus around Oxford and the stories of some of the older Don sort of throwing it out of the window and people described it as a bombshell. In that book, he argues that only statements of fact have a sense. So any sentence that you might utter, if it can't be measured or empirically tested by a scientist, then it doesn't strictly mean anything. Now, he wanted to put that forward because he wanted to destroy metaphysics. So he wanted to say, you know, all this guff about whether or not God exists. or what is truth and all, you know, this is just nonsense. You know, all there is is questions like,

what is the boiling points of water? And, you know, scientists can find that out for us. So he had this view that the task of philosophy was not to discover the fundamental structure of the universe, but was just to clarify language in a way that would allow the scientists to get to work and do their job. How successful was it? Not very because we're all still here, I suppose. But it was a really powerful manifesto. And one of the chapters in that book is about ethics,

because what happens in the course of him kind of taking weed killer, if you like, to philosophy, is the weed killer spreads to moral utterances as well. Because it turns out if I say, you know, murder is wrong, or you ought not to tell lies, well, we can't give that to a scientist as an empirical hypothesis. So that turns out also to be not a statement of fact. And so this leaves a question

about how we should understand value statements. So a non-cognitivist, so that's where we started, is somebody who thinks that when I make a moral utterance or moral sentences aren't statements. of fact. They're not verifiable. They're not truth. They don't have a truth value because they don't say anything about how the world is. Now, once you've made that negative point that they're not statements of fact, the question is then, well, what are they? And AJS says, well, really, they're expressions of emotion. So if I say murder is wrong, what I'm really saying is,

you know, boo to murdering. So I'm not saying something true or something. I'm just saying, boo. And of course, this means that the only sort of real task for moral philosophy is a kind of linguistic task, the task of wondering about what the sort of structure, if you like, of a moral utterance is. And there's nothing to say about the substantive question for moral philosophers of what good or bad or anything like that really is. At the time the men were going to war, and a lot of the philosophers in Oxford Cambridge and many of the universities were in the intelligence services and so on,

which in a sense left the field open to women philosophers. And she was surrounded by Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foote, Mary Midgley, at Oxford at the same time. Did they form a group that helped each other, or was it just happenstance that they were all there at the same time? Mary Midgeley talks in her memoir about this time, about the way in which the absence of the men and the context of the war changed the character of philosophy. at Oxford. So she says that before the war the philosophy was

characterized by a lot of clever young men competing at winning arguments. And she says what happened in the wartime classes was that we all sort of turned out as she puts it turned our attention onto this deeply puzzling world. So she talks about a shift in attention

and also a context in which maybe different voices and particularly women's voices could get hurt. Now, Anscom and those are the other three women you mentioned, got to know each other at this time. And it was really, I think, after the war, when the men came back and non-cognitivism sort of picked up again, that the four of them sort of clubbed together and Philip Afoot, you know, in Philip Afoot's living room and said, this is no good.

And I think that they're kind of, this is no good, had two aspects to it. So one was that because for non-cognitivists like Ahr and R.M. Hear, all there is to do in moral philosophy is talk about the meaning of moral terms. There's no actual content to it. It meant that there was no idea that moral philosophy could pursue questions about what was good for human beings, about, you know, substantive truths, about what flourishing would be for us, about virtues. And these questions were all off the table. And I think that second of all, the context of the war, and in particular, Philippa Foothier, talks about the context of the Holocaust and we're talking a minute about the context of Hiroshima, meant that it just seemed to the fore of them that this was absurd

that moral philosophy at this crucial moment had sort of deserted the field and that there was no way of saying, you know, the Nazis were wrong or this was bad, which is what they wanted to say, of course. Thank you very much. Roger, in 1956, Anskam argued against Oxford awarding an honorary degrader Harry S. Truman. What was her argument? Yes, Harry Truman has been no, dropped those two bonds on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And as you said at the beginning, Anscom's view of him was that he was a mass murderer

and thought it was inappropriate. Let's put it that way for him to be offered an honorary degree. She produced a little pamphlet, which is now, which was called Mr. Truman's degree, to explain her thoughts. and the thoughts were really to be ones which she elaborated more in, both in the famous book, intention, but also more importantly,

in modern moral philosophy. Essentially, the justification for dropping the bonds was that in doing so, more lives were saved by bringing the war to a hastier end. That, for Aske, would be to not distinguish properly between people that you kill and people that die as a result of things that you do. And that's the distinguishing.

which is familiar even in obvious legal situations. Let's say a gunman is on the rampage somewhere. I have a gun. I fail to shoot the gunman. Maybe I don't do well. Maybe I should have, but one thing I'm not accusable of is murdering those people that die.

The people that died were killed by the gunman. Similarly, if I build a motorway knowing that there are going to be a lot of deaths due to drivers, those can't be put on my account. And she would say to those defendants, in Truman, if you kill a lot of people, you killed a lot of people. And if they're innocence, then you've murdered them.

If you don't do something such that killing will go on, you're not a murderer on the contrary, you're doing the right thing in avoiding murder. So really, it's an instance of two very different approaches to moral questions, which she was to make explicit in the article of modern moral philosophy. And whereas the sort of position she was to label consequentialist would say, ask yourself what effects would ensue from your doing this or not doing that. She would say, no, the older and better principle of life is do no evil.

And that's a completely different question. It's a very simple question in a way. And I think the listeners would be as interested as I was, that she stood up. And this is the president of the United States. And these were two great events, and everybody thought, oh, well, that helps to end the war. And she said, but it was mass murder. And we should not stand for that. So what is her argument?

She goes to quite great lengths to say that she's not a pacifist. This is not a pacifist argument. It's coming from Aquinas, who we spoke about earlier, who had this doctrine of double effect. And what this means is that when I act, my actions can have consequences that I intend and consequences that I foresee but do not intend, as in the motorway example,

where I might foresee that people will have car crashes, but I'm not building the motorway in order for people to die in car crashes. By contrast, Truman is bombing in order to kill those people. So they're used as a means to ending the war, and their deaths are intended. They're not merely foreseen. And she gives the example of it's not like he's bombing some military buildings or government buildings,

and he foresees that there may be some civilians around. he intends to kill the civilians and that makes it murder but she's not a pacifist it's fine for that to you know war is never a good thing she says but if you're not the aggressor you might have to enter it what you'll be honest

Rachel yeah I think you're right Robin that it's such a striking scene the idea of this young woman standing up before all these dons and calling the president a mass murderer I mean, it's kind of astonishing when you imagine what it must have been like, and I think it shows something really important about her as a person and the kind of the courage of her.

But she's... No, nobody takes notice. Nobody took notice. Although actually I say that, but afterwards, she received many letters, including from people who had been in Hiroshima, you know, who'd witnessed the bomb saying, thank you, you know, thank you for saying this thing. But what you hear in that pamphlet is this sense of despair that modern philosophers and the broader public have somehow lost sight of the dreadful sin of murder because they're fixated on thinking about bringing about good consequences.

And she thinks that's a sign of sort of deep corruption. Yeah, I'm just on the question of how much attention was paid to all this. I didn't realize until relatively recently how much coverage this event got. Not just in the newspapers of this country, the Guardian, the Times, the Office of Mail, of course, but in American newspapers it was, you could say a scandal. And it was extraordinarily attended to that a Don, and a woman Dawn was trying to prevent the president of the United States from getting an honorary degree. So the ripples were certainly felt.

And he was even asked about it. And he said, given the facts again, and I do it again? Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Constantly, you're going to ask you, in 1957, she published her book, Intention, which is basically, as I understand it, it's about the philosophy of action. Can you tell us what that is and why it was important?

If you look at the history of philosophy, philosophers have always been interested in action in a number of ways. for example, free will is something most people know something about, do we have free will, are our actions determined, when are we responsible for an action? So responsibility and sort of moral and legal philosophy. And in philosophy of mind, you know, think of Descartes, mind causes body, so what is the cause of action, what is the relation between mind and body? So action has featured in the history of philosophy, but it was always either part of moral philosophy or part of the philosophy of mind,

whereas after Anskam, it becomes a philosophical field in its own right, even though the reason she has for doing philosophy of action is that she thinks we can't do moral philosophy until we know what is an action, how is an action related to desire, how is an action related to intention, which is the name of the book, what is it to act intentionally versus voluntarily, unintentionally, what is it to do something by mistake rather than accident? And so these are the kind of questions that philosophers of action are interested in, as opposed, in addition to just free will and so on.

Rachel, can you tell listeners how she went about investigating the idea of intentionary? Yeah, it's such a wonderful book, and I would recommend anybody listening to go and get it. It's very, very thin, which is deceptive, because it makes you think, oh, I could read this very quickly. So at the beginning of the book, she says, look, there's three kinds of cases in which we might. speak about intention. So we might, if somebody says, oh, I'm going for a pint, then we can say that's an expression of intention for the future. If somebody is walking along, we might say that's an intentional action. And if somebody does something surprising, like kicks me under the table, I might ask what was the intention with which they did that? So we've got three uses that look very

different there, because one's about the future, one's about now and one's about the past. And Anscombe asks, well, what connects these three different uses? Now, traditionally, you might think, or most philosophers might think, well, there must be some fact or some property or some feature of the person in the situation that we're picking out with the word intention, you know, a state of mind or a character or something like that. And what's amazing about Anscombe is she doesn't do that at all. instead she does what Wittgenstein does and she says

what we're interested in when we're interested in the character of a concept when we're interested in what the word intention means if you like is its use and what we're interested in is the kind of pattern of use that all of those three cases share and so I mean one example I was thinking about

as a kind of parallel is suppose you wanted to know about what chess was you know you could watch two people playing chess and you could write down everything they did and every thought they had and every movement they made and you wouldn't know anything about chess at all because what you'd want to know is the rules and you'd want to know which would give you a sense of the pattern like why are they moving things that way why are certain moves prohibited and certain moves are allowed and you might want to know about the broader context that playing chess plays in human life so you might want to think

about how it relates to other games and warfare and wrestling or whatever. So Anskam, instead of sort of looking at features or properties of people and states of mind when she's investigating intention, wants to look for the pattern in human life that is characteristic of the appearance of this concept. And then she has the most incredible idea, which every time I think about it blows my mind, And she thinks, okay, I can find out that pattern. I can reveal that pattern by looking at the way in which we use the question why. So if I say, Melvin, why are you reaching for that cup?

And you say, I'm thirsty. Okay, this is an example of an answer that shows me that you were doing it intentionally. If you say, oh, I didn't even know I was reaching for the cup. I was, you know, I must have been, you know, I don't know, I was dreaming or it was an accident or something. then I know it wasn't intentional. So she has this amazing idea that if she can give an account of or a description of when we use the question why and the kind of answers to that question that show that what the person is doing is intentional under the description,

that's going to reveal this amazing pattern. And so that's what she does in the book. And it's incredibly complicated, but it's sort of incredibly elegant as well, I think. You want to come in? The book does so many different things. The why question is central, but it leads off into a whole lot of different directions, because this is a topic which covers mind and body, ethics, our knowledge of the future. Consider, you know, I know that I'm going to be in the pub this evening.

How? Not in the same way that I know that Constantine is going to be in the pub. Why not? Well, because he told me so, and I know he's a pub goer, but in my own case, I've decided to. You say, what are you going to do this evening? I think of it and say, I'll be in the pub. That's not a prediction in the same sense. in which I might say

I'll get the plague if it's going around. That's the prediction about me, but I'm not predicting of myself as well. I don't need to observe myself on the basis of my observations say, you know what? I think I'm probably going to, this body is probably going to walk over there into that thing which is a pub. It's rather a declaration.

She's like Vickersty makes comparisons and a useful comparison for a declaration of intention like I'm going to the shop is an instruction. So, for example, I could say to someone else, go to the shop, get the following items. And that's that's sort of prediction.

It's an instruction. And she has a nice example, which is known as the shopping example, where a list I give my partner, you know, with eggs, butter, cereal, you know, fish. They go off, they come back, the basket that they bring back, hasn't got the fish on it.

She makes this a point, well, where's the error? Is the error in what I said in the list? Or is it somehow in what the person did? Well, obviously, the mismatch, between what's in the basket and my list is the fault of the basket holder, is the fault of the person who is meant to be carrying out the order. Contrast that with a detective who follows a shop or into a shop. Same list, they've got a list of items because they've been watching

what the person buys. If there's a mismatch between the detective list and what's in the basket, that's the detective's fault because the detective's list is meant to match the world, if you like. It's meant to reflect what was done. Where does that take us? It shows that when I either express a decision, I'm going to go to the shop and I'm going to get X, Y and Z, or, analogously, if I tell someone to do those things, that the function of that list, that instruction,

that expression of intention, isn't to report something about what's going to happen, though it's in the future tense. It's, as it were, meant to make it happen. Is that to do with acting under a description? Everything connects. That's another important topic that she brings in. She has a nice example of,

pumping a man pumping a pump. What's he doing? Well, he's pumping a pump, but he's also doing a bunch of other things. He's making his arm go up and down. He's pushing water through a pipe. He's replenishing the water tank in the house on the hill. One action with many descriptions. And some of those descriptions are not relevant to the person's intention, making a squeaking noise. Perhaps he didn't even know he was doing that. But perhaps he did, but it's not the reason he's doing it. So the description under which an action is always not intentional is a very important observation because you can't just say, was that actually intentional? This is one of of Anscom's main points, because it might be intentional under one description and unintentional

under another. Thank you. Constantine, intention is a notoriously difficult book. Why is it so difficult? The language isn't technical. Unlike a lot of contemporary philosophy, she uses quite ordinary terms. However, unlike most philosophical works, it doesn't have things like an introduction, a conclusion, chapters, here's what I will do next, I will now argue for this, because, so it doesn't have that kind of narrating, guiding thread that tells you, here's how it's going to go, I'm now going to do this, I've shown this, here's a little recap. She thinks, as Wittgenstein did, that really the reader needs to do the thinking, the reader needs to do the hard work, and if the reader can't connect these things, there, I mean, she would often use

the word, including of Truman in the pamphlet, Stupid, and she says that of many, of people who we think of as the great philosophers from history of ideas and so on. So it's quite tough in that way. She's not willing to guide the reader. Why not do you think? I was just thinking about Melvin saying to Roger, where is this taking us?

And I think that that is how one feels reading intention. And it connects, I think, with this idea that you think for an account of intention or intentional action, you want to be told about some property or some state of mind, You want an account of that and how it brings about these actions and you want a theory of action. And she's not giving you that. She's sort of describing these very mundane situations in which people are doing their shopping and pumping some water. And so it's really hard to resist to not be thinking the whole time, well, where is this going?

And where it's going, I think, is you end up with a really careful description of this order that is there whenever actions are done. with intentions of the kind that Roger was talking about with the pumper. So this idea that whenever somebody's acting intentionally, there's going to be a set of descriptions of what they're doing that can be linked together by the phrase in order to, in order to. So I'm moving my arm in order to operate the pump, in order to replenish the water supply, in order to. And this sort of linking of nested descriptions,

which link, if you like a bodily movement, is something I'm aimed at. That's what she's aiming to describe. And she thinks that if she can describe that formal order, that's all we need to know what intention is. You've now asking us, but why does this matter? What's the point of this? Where is it going?

And it's important precisely because of the Truman case. It's important because when people were defending Truman, they were saying things like he didn't bomb anything. He just signed a piece of paper. and she wants to say that in signing a piece of paper, he is ordering the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that's an action re-description. And he knows he's doing that.

He's not being fooled. It's not like someone who says sign here. And then they say, got you. Look what you've just ordered. He's not been tricked. He's doing it in the description under which the action is intentional under that description of ordering the bombing. And so this stuff,

It's not just pure theory for her. It's really important to the question of who is and who isn't a murderer, for example. Do you get the word consequentialism out of this? Her word, did she invent that word? And if so... Yeah, she did invent that word. So you don't get the word consequentialism in intention. So the word consequentialism, as Roger says, is in modern moral philosophy.

It occurs once before in an earlier place, actually. That's its first famous occurrence. Yeah. Consequentialism nowadays is a view that the right action is whichever action brings about the best consequences. So if you're trying to decide whether to go to the pub or walk your dog, then you think, well, which one will bring about the best consequences? And then you should do that one. So that's consequentialism now. But I think when Anscombe coined the phrase, she means something that does link much more closely to what we've done. just been talking out. She means the view that one is equally responsible for all the consequences

of what one does, regardless of whether or not you intend them or merely foresee them. And so what that ordering of descriptions that we've just been talking about in intention does is it allows you to pick out which descriptions of what's going to happen as a result of what you do are the ones that you intend and so are therefore the ones for which you're responsible and which are if you like things that you foresee but they're not in that order of intentional action so it's a way of showing how it is that some future consequences are relevant to the question of the character of your act and some aren't constantine she talks about aristotle why does she bring aristotle into her equations.

A big thing for her was, she was a Roman Catholic, but many people she, both people she respected philosophically and people maybe who she didn't respect as much were more secular than her in various ways and to varying degrees. And she was interested in how secular and religious people could have moral discussions. Relating to the stuff about context in Wittgenstein, she thinks that a lot of contemporary moral philosophy,

and that's in that paper, modern moral philosophy, takes concepts such as moral obligation, moral, specifically moral rightness and so on, from basically a judo-Christian context and uses them in a secular way, and they're stripped from the context which gave them meaning. And she thinks that people are using these terms, and they don't mean anything in a secular society,

or they don't mean what they... Can you give a example of a few more? of these terms that we're not needed? It's moral rightness, for example. So it's the idea of what is it to have a moral duty, a specifically moral duty, as opposed to the way we ordinarily use the word duty. Now, she likes Aristotle because it precedes this judo-Christian context,

and she looks at Aristotle and says he doesn't talk of specifically moral duty obligation. He talks of what's the good thing to do, what's the virtuous thing to do, why is this a vicious motive? And she thinks if religious and secular thinkers go back and use that terminology, then we can kind of overcome this question of what is it to talk of moral obligation if you do believe in God or if you don't, divine command theory and so on. So you go back to this context where these terms haven't been invented yet

and you look at how ethics was done. and instead of saying that's no good because it's not Christian, she embraces it. And in a way, that's how what's called Neo-Iristatidia and virtue ethics is kind of born. And this interest in the virtues and the good, the bad, the evil, rather than these notions of a right action and its relation to consequences. Thank you very much. Rachel, what does she mean when she says with the first person pronoun, I is not a referring term. What does that mean?

That's a good question. This is a phrase from a paper that she published in 1975 called The First Person. But actually when you look, she was already thinking about this question when she was working with Wittgenstein in the 1940s. So this is a question that really becomes, if you like, a thread through her work. She starts the paper by thinking about Descartes, I think therefore I am. And she notices that Descartes concludes or draws from this Cogito, the idea that I in, I think, therefore I am, can't refer to my body, can't refer to his body, can't refer to the person, Descartes, the man, Dacut.

Because he realizes that he can entertain the thought, I think, therefore I am, even while he's doubting that there is any man or that he has a body. So he comes to think that I must be the name for a self or a soul or some special part of him. Now, Anscombe thinks that's disastrous. She wants to get the whole person back into philosophy. You know, this is a Viconstinian thought, and it connects with exactly the kind of virtue ethics

that Constantine has been talking about because you want to be able to talk about me, the whole person, Rachel, as being responsible for the actions, not, you know, something that's going on inside me or something like that. So it's a really complicated argument, but basically what she says is, look, Descartes thought that because he could never be wrong about who he was referring to when he was referring to, when he was using I, I must be referring to some special secret part of himself. But actually, she says, look, the real reason that you can't ever be wrong, you can't make a mistake when you use I as to the reference, is that you're not actually picking anything out when you use the word I. It doesn't refer to anything. She says, with I, there is only the use.

Now, in a way, this is a bit like what she does in intention. Like she says that you think that if you want to know what intention is, you're going to have to look at fine-term property of a human being. If you think that if you want to know what I refers to, you're going to have to find some part of you. But actually, let's have a look at how we use the word I. Like, let's describe the use. And this is a really profound move because it allows her to give an account of self-consciousness,

which is a really thorny philosophical topic, without saying, oh, it's consciousness of a self, right? Rather, she says self-consciousness, just is that which is manifested when somebody uses the word I. So when I say, you know, I'm sitting, I'm talking, I'm standing, I'm in pain, I'm not referring to some myself and predicating some property of myself. Rather, I'm using the word I to express something. This connects with something Wakenstein says, right,

that when I say I'm in pain, it's not like I'm referring. referring to myself and then saying, I have this property pain. It's more like saying, ouch, which we don't think has any referring as part of it. And we're coming towards the end of the programme now. What has her influence been? The kind of philosophy that Anscom did, in her attitude to philosophy itself, I think, is something important, like Wittgenstein, and she certainly gets this sort of thought from Wittgenstein. Philosophy isn't to be thought of as a career or as a discipline in the sense of,

geography, perhaps, but much closer to an activity. I think she's an excellent role model for any philosopher who's in danger of being sucked into academia, which is increasingly professionalised. The last thing that she or Wittgenstein, or indeed Socrates would have thought about philosophy was that it's suitable as a profession with a career structure and so on.

This connects with her enormous breadth. We've talked about her very important work in ethics and action and a little bit on the first person, but actually there's a whole lot more. everything connected as far as she was concerned. So she's very unlike the more recent sort of philosopher who says, I work on blah. I work on the philosophy of dental hygiene or something like that.

And it's almost a matter of pride in a modern academic philosopher to say that because it sounds a bit like science. You know, I work on mammalian endocrine systems or something like that. I think she and Wittgenstein both saw that in doing philosophy, you can't home in on one little thing and do it. justice because of the fact that what you're actually doing is looking at a vast network of interconnected concepts, which are our concepts and our way of thinking of things. So her role in philosophy, apart from being a very great philosophy in my view, she also represents that

approach to philosophy, which is that it's terribly serious and not seduced by theory building for the sake of theory building, but to give an honest and detailed account. of the sorts of conceptual models we get into, and that means hard work, actually, but she was capable of notoriously an extremely hard worker and tough person. Thank you very much. I think that's a good way to conclude this conversation.

Thank you. Roger Hickman, Rachel Wiseman, and Constantine Sanders, and to our studio engineer Duncan Hannan. Next week, the biggest planet in the solar system, that's Jupiter. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What would you like to have said that you didn't get time to say? Well, I suppose the thing that I've become really interested recently is thinking about Anscom's work in relation to the other women that you mentioned earlier, Philippa Fulton, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley. And I think one thing that, I think Constantine touched on when you were talking about Aristotle, that I think is really important in Anscom and in all of those women is this idea that, you know, moral philosophy has a subject matter. It's not just about language in the way that air and hair thought. It has a subject matter and its subject matter is what is a good human life?

What is it to live well? And this is a question that they all get from the ancients. Actually, I wanted to say earlier, Constantine, there's a lovely bit where Anscombe says, that until she met Wittgenstein, the ancient philosophers, so Plato and Aristotle were like statues, and that they came to life for her through Wittgenstein. So there's a way in which she sort of animates this Aristotelian idea

that we should be looking at what is a good human life through Wittgenstein's idea that we can describe, you know, these activities and that we can get a certain kind of richness of description out of that, that then gives her this, really kind of new version, I think, of Aristotle's investigation, if you like. And I think for all of those women, this question of, you know, what is it to live well, where that's a question that we're not asking about robots or aliens or some kind of abstract, you know, computer program, but we're asking, what is it for us?

You know, the kind of animal that we are to live a good life, just as we can ask, what is it for a cat to live a good life or a squirrel or a tree? We can ask that question about human as well. And that really that's what the content of moral philosophy comes from that investigation as to, you know, well, what is it to live well as a human? And I think she's given us Wittgenstein because, you know, she translated the philosophical investigations, as Constantine said. But her translation is beautiful.

You know, she really had this sense. and there's a lovely BBC broadcast of her talking about this just after her translation came out, so just after Viclachina died, where she talks about it as a literary work, and you can see that she treats it as such in her translation. And I think a lot of the power of the philosophical investigations comes from the way she handled that translation.

But her work began to influence other people quite early on, and one of them was the Harvard philosopher, Donald Davidson. What did he do with him? her work. I think Constantine probably knows more about this, tonight. Yeah, so Davidson on the one hand says something like intention is, you know, one of the

greatest works that have been written in recent times. He has a lot of respect for Anskam. And one thing he gets from her is this stuff about description, which we can talk more about. But on the other hand, he does set his own work as opposed to some of the things Anskine was

doing. So we have this kind of respect for her, but at some point he moves towards thinking that there can be, and he changes his mind. So a few years into him working on these issues, he decides that there can be an intention that's a mental state independent of any behavior and so on, and that it can cause action. So we end up with a view that has a kind of action in the middle and mental cause on one side and a physical consequence. on the other. And that moves away from Anscom's more sort of impressionistic account of how the, how intention is related to action. But one thing that happens with Donald Davidson is that

philosophy of action really now does become a field in its own right. However, maybe I'm, maybe others will think I'm pessimistic about this, but it seems to me that after Davidson, philosophy of action is of far greater interest to philosophers of mind than it is to moral philosophers. And in that sense, Anscom wouldn't be too happy with that result, that in a way, moral philosophers kept doing what they do, they had their theories of right action, and action is right, if and only if, and then you plug in your favorite theory without stopping to ask, but what is an action? What is this thing of which we are? And Anscombe thinks that's disastrous.

and Davidson's own view was that actions are events but if you plug that in you get weird things like an event is morally right if and then what does it mean for an event to be morally right or for us to have a moral obligation for an event to occur do you take that on? Well and another yes

one of the things as Constantine has indicated which comes out in Davidson is is that it's a causal theory he's not allowed There are many predecessors for Davidson and this, the essential thought is we can explain a voluntary action or an intentional action as my body doing something and the cause of it,

the thing that preceded it, which made it happen, is an intention. And in some ways you can think of Ascombe and Wittgenstein as harking right back to Aristotle because Aristotle draws our attention to the fact that there are two different kinds of explanation you can give. For example, if somebody says, why is that heart, why is that organ pumping, you might say, well, because the muscles are contracting or their electrical stimulation is going to the thing that make the muscles contract. That's what's called an efficient cause. It's something, an event or process prior to what you're talking about, making it happen.

But another obvious answer would be so as to get the blood to go around the body. And Aristotle calls that a final cause. And essentially, they're not incompatible. they're just two different two different senses of the question why is that doing what it's doing

and I think Ansela's going to say the same is true of action that we should distinguish why did you raise your arm oh because my neurons my neurons fired

and my muscles contracted that's a causal explanation perfectly true but probably not what the interlocutor is after they probably want to know what your reason is so in broad brush terms

we have the distinction often described as between reasons and causes. And whereas Davidson is definitely the old causal, he doesn't want to say there's that distinction, he wants to reduce the whole field of action and no doubt biology and everything else to a causal account, efficient causation. And skim like Aristotle says, no, there's a plurality of different kinds of explanation. You're confusing or you shouldn't conflate causal explanation, which is the domain of science, etc. with reason explanation, which is the domain of ethics and of rationality and so on.

It's really unfortunate for Anscombe in a way because she writes in such a difficult way, as we've just described, and perhaps because she's a woman, that when Davidson takes her up and says, oh, everything I'm saying now is me clarifying Anscom. She was very unclear, but now I'm going to give you what she really meant in a very clear way. Philosophers sort of stopped reading Anscombe. So for a long time, everybody would call it the Davidson Anscombe position. And it's only very recently that philosophers have actually started rereading Anscom herself and noticing exactly the things that Constantine and Roger were pointing to,

which is this is vastly different from what Davidson was doing. So she's in this peculiar position that she's sort of seen this beginning philosophy of action, but actually philosophy of action has kind of proceeded down a path that she is sort of completely in the opposite direction to where she was trying to take people. Going back to what Rachel was saying about virtue ethics, I think it's definitely true that this is largely down to Anscom. And I think that's a good thing,

but there are aspects of it that she wouldn't have liked. For example, virtue ethics has now become one more theory in moral philosophy that, oh, I'm a Kantian, I'm a consequentialist, I'm a virtue ethicist. Whereas part of Anscom's point, I think, in modern moral philosophy is that she thinks no one should be doing ethics if they're not discussing the virtues. A virtue ethics isn't a theory to oppose other theories with. It's something that if you're not interested in how my action relates to my character, you're not really doing ethics.

you can't be doing ethics. And that's where she comes up with what we now call philosophy of action, but she really called philosophical psychology. And I think she's also given rise to that. But again, that's now become a separate branch. Oh, if you're interested in these things, you're not interested in moral theory. You're interested in philosophical psychology.

And it's become an increasingly empirical branch of moral philosophy, whereas I think for Anscom, it was what Rachel was describing, It was the observation of how our psychological and moral concepts work and relate to each other, not something to be branched away. So she's sort of responsible for these huge things, but they don't quite carry on in the way she would have wanted them to, I think. They're not sufficiently intermingled. Before we go, you knew her towards the end of her life, is that right?

I knew her actually since I was seven so well. from about 1970 when she began her professorship in Cambridge. So how would you describe her? Well, she was a quite unique individual. And one salient thing about her was, which one picked up pretty quickly, whatever age one was, was that she was unconventional.

Her attitudes to convention were sometimes quite blaze. And that this yields a number of, of very good anecdotes, by the way. For example, she was unusual in her time and place to not wear skirts. She always wore trousers. She preferred wearing trousers. And women wearing trousers in, you know, in that setting was extremely unusual. There's a nice anecdote that when she went to America visiting a university, her host took her to a posh restaurant somewhere. And the, I don't know when this was probably the 70s or perhaps the 60s, the person, the doorman, I suppose, of this restaurant said, I'm afraid ladies may not be admitted wearing

trousers. And she was wearing slacks of some sort. So, and her host was mortified and said, I'm so sorry, Elizabeth, we have to go somewhere else. And she said, no, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. She walked to some little cubby hole or a corner somewhere, removed her trousers and reappeared at the door of the hotel with her host. She was wearing some sort of slip or something or other, but she said, you're not allowed to wear trousers, then here I am. Did you get in? They got in, yes.

And the dormant didn't have the face, didn't have the guts to say, no, that doesn't do either. So that's one of many nice anecdotes about her having really no care for the sillier conventions and trammels of ordinary. I've just been, I was about so interrupted, but creatively disturbed by the producer. Good like a cup of tea. Yeah. Along with COVID-19 came the rise of the conspiracy theory movement in the UK. The system's rotten at the core. It should be deleted.

I'm Marianna Spring. In my new series, I'll be exposing how radical some people in the movement have become and how alternative media is fuelling them. Many crazy stories have been spread so far and wide that it's hard to see this ending well. Mariana in Conspiracy Land on BBC Radio 4. Available now on BBC Sounds.