G. E. M. Anscombe - Life

Life

G. E. M. Anscombe was born to Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe and Allen Wells Anscombe, on 18 March 1919, in Limerick, Ireland, where her father had been posted as an officer in the British army during the Irish War of Independence.

She graduated from Sydenham High School in 1937, and went on to read "Mods & Greats" (classics, ancient history, and philosophy) at St Hugh's College, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1941. During her first undergraduate year she converted to Roman Catholicism, and remained a lifelong devout catholic. She garnered controversy when she publicly opposed Britain's entry into World War II, although her father had been a soldier, and one of her brothers was to serve during the war. In 1941 she married Peter Geach, like her a Roman Catholic convert, a student of Wittgenstein, and a distinguished British academic philosopher. Together they had three sons and four daughters.

After graduating from Oxford, Anscombe was awarded a research fellowship for postgraduate study at Newnham College, Cambridge from 1942 to 1945. Her purpose was to attend Ludwig Wittgenstein's lectures. Her interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy arose from reading the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an undergraduate: she claimed to have conceived the idea of studying with Wittgenstein as soon as she opened the book in Blackwell's and read section 5.53, "Identity of object I express by identity of sign, and not by using a sign for identity. Difference of objects I express by difference of signs." She became an enthusiastic student, feeling that Wittgenstein's therapeutic method helped to free her from philosophical difficulties in ways that her training in traditional systematic philosophy could not. As she wrote:

For years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: "I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?" ...I always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. I couldn't see my way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the central nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgenstein's classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought I have got this, and I define "yellow" (say) as this being effectively attacked.

After her fellowship at Cambridge ended, she was awarded a research fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, but during the academic year of 1946 - 1947, she continued to travel to Cambridge once a week, together with her fellow student W. A. Hijab, to attend tutorials with Wittgenstein on the philosophy of religion. She became one of Wittgenstein's favourite students and one of his closest friends (Monk 497-498). Wittgenstein affectionately referred to her by the pet name "old man" - an exception to his general dislike of academic women. His confidence in Anscombe's understanding of his perspective is shown by his choice of her as translator of his Philosophical Investigations before she had learned German, for which purpose he arranged a stay in Vienna.

Anscombe visited Wittgenstein many times after he left Cambridge in 1947, and travelled to Cambridge in April 1951 to visit him on his death bed. Wittgenstein named her, along with Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright, as his literary executor, and after his death in 1951, she was responsible for editing, translating, and publishing many of Wittgenstein's manuscripts and notebooks.

She scandalised liberal colleagues with articles defending the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to contraception in the 1960s and early 1970s. Later in life, she was arrested twice while protesting outside an abortion clinic in Britain, after abortion had been legalised (albeit with restrictions).

Anscombe remained at Somerville College from 1946 to 1970. She was also known for her willingness to face fierce public controversy in the name of her Catholic faith. In 1956, while a research fellow at Oxford University, she protested against Oxford's decision to grant an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, whom she denounced as a mass murderer for his use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anscombe was elected Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University in 1970, where she served until her retirement in 1986. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979.

In her later years, Anscombe suffered from heart disease, and was nearly killed by an automobile accident in 1996. She spent her last years in the care of her family in Cambridge. She died, aged 81, with her husband and four of their seven children at her bedside, on 5 January 2001.

She had not said where she was to be buried, and the family chose what is now Ascension Parish burial ground, as it was the nearest one to home. There was some difficulty in getting a full-size plot, where she could be buried without being cremated first. This was not possible in the new part of the cemetery, so the site finally obtained, after negotiation with Ely diocesan authorities, was that of an old grave, corner-to-corner with the plot where Wittgenstein had been buried half a century before.