The Life and Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe

Elizabeth Anscombe was one of four brilliant women philosophers who were contemporaries at Oxford just before the Second World War – with Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot. She was a pupil and translator of Wittgenstein, and became professor of philosophy at Cambridge in 1970. Midgley speaks for them all when she criticises the style of philosophising that consists of clever young men competing to win arguments based on simple oppositions. The essays cover the range of her philosophical concerns, and will mainly be of interest to academic philosophers. However, the introduction by John Haldane and the excellent essay by Sir Anthony Kenny on Elizabeth Anscombe at Oxford are highly accessible. Kenny was a graduate student at the time, and recalls how it was possible to drop in at any time to initiate a philosophical conversation, in spite of children running about (Anscombe was married to the philosopher Peter Geach and they had seven children) - others who dropped by included John Searle and Tom Nagel.

John contributes a lucid essay on Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul, which will perhaps be of most interest to readers of this journal. Anscombe takes the view that 'the only tenable conception of the soul is the Aristotelian conception of the soul as the form, or actual organisation, of the living body' - elsewhere she refers to the soul as the primary principle. Her Catholicism comes through when she writes that 'there is no reason whatever for believing in a temporal immortality of the soul apart from the resurrection; above all there is no "natural immortality of the soul" that can be demonstrated by philosophy…' She is anti-materialism, but also rejects Cartesian immaterialism, although elsewhere she seems to have some sympathy with the Platonic view, a point which raises questions for John (p. 103). In any event, in contrast to the Oxford and Cambridge philosophers H.H. Price and C.D. Broad, she does not refer to any empirical evidence in this respect, although I believe that this does shed some light on the question.