Blackwell Reference Online

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Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, British philosopher, studied Greats at Oxford (1937–41), and went as a research student to Cambridge, where she became a pupil and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She was appointed Research Fellow (1946), Lecturer (1951), and Tutorial Fellow (1964) of Somer ville College, Oxford. In 1967 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy. She held the Chair of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge from 1970 to 1986. Her philosophical outlook has been influenced most of all by Aristotle and by Wittgenstein. She is one of Wittgenstein's literary executors, and has translated and edited large parts of his work. At the same time she shows great originality, not least in the way in which she brings Wittgenstein's ideas to bear on topics that he did not himself explore. Many of her papers are remarkable also for the uniquely appreciative, unsparing, and creative manner in which she engages with great minds of the past, such as Hume. Anscombe has a gift for spotting what is most basic in traditional problems, and often her solutions seem to open one's eyes to what lay under one's nose. Her language is forceful and austere, her thinking unrestricted by convention or fashion. An early example of her independence of mind can be seen in “The Justice of the Present War Examined,” a pamphlet written with Norman Daniel in the autumn of 1939. Here she ... log in or subscribe to read full text