The Anscombean Mind

Adrian Haddock, Rachael Wiseman, Adrian Haddock, Rachael Wiseman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429581991
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001) is one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Known primarily for influencing research in action theory and moral philosophy, her work also has relevance in the study of metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and politics.

The Anscombean Mind provides a comprehensive survey of Anscombe's thought, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its enduring significance in contemporary debates. Divided into three clear parts, twenty-three chapters by an international array of contributors address the following themes:

• ancient philosophy
• metaphysics
• mind and language
• Wittgenstein
• action and ethics
• politics
• religion and faith.

The Anscombean Mind is an indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching action theory, ethics, moral philosophy, Wittgenstein, twentieth-century philosophy, and Anscombe herself.

1 REPORT TO THE MARY SOMERVILLE FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE, MAY 1948¹

G.E.M. Anscombe

DOI: 10.4324/9780429198601-2

Editors’ Note

Between 1947 and 1952, Elizabeth Anscombe was Mary Somerville Research Fellow at the Oxford University college of that name. She took this position after a four year spell at Cambridge during which she met and studied under Wittgenstein, while continuing her Oxford DPhil with Fredrich Waismann. While being a Mary Somerville Research Fellow, Anscombe filed an annual report on her work. This report was submitted in May of the second year of her fellowship.

The progress that I make in philosophy is partly by advancing on a centre from many sides. It has another feature which I shall explain after describing the ring of problems on which most of my work has been done this year.

1. Phenomenalism. I have been working on this subject with Plato’s Theaetetus as a starting point, and principally on two questions; a) is there any special connexion between phenomenalism and the doctrine that man is the measure of all things, as Plato claims? I have tried to show that there is, in the sense that the doctrine is characteristically absent from ‘intellectualists’ philosophies such as Plato’s, Aristotle’s, Aquinas’, Descartes’; and I have done a certain amount towards shewing why it is absent from such philosophies; and I am interested in making out whether the idea of man as the measure of all things is implied in Oxford philosophical work of the present day which is neither intellectualist nor phenomenalist. b) the refutation of phenomenalism by consideration that every statement and every concept has a logic; including the names of sensible qualities and the epistemologically primitive propositions announced as data by phenomenalism (This work, together with much on the problem of false belief, will go towards the preparation of lectures on the Theaetetus next term).
2. This problem immediately links up with that of mental events and contents – e.g. by way of the ‘criterion in oneself’ of which Plato makes the phenomenalist speak; or by the concept of a mental act, such as meaning ‘red’, as a symbol of a quite special kind. The peculiarity would consist in this; that a thing cannot be characterised as a symbol without being characterised logically, but the thing that is a symbol – e.g. a mark on paper or a set of flashes – can usually be described as something quite apart from and antecedently to its being a symbol. But the mental seems to be characterised essentially by what it is of, whether it is a sensation or an image or a thought. This I use to explain the Greek idea that ‘like knows like’, Plato’s thought of the affinity between the word and its form; the Aristotelian ‘intellectual quodammodo omnia’, St Thomas’s theory of ‘esse naturale’, ‘esse sensibile’, ‘esse intelligibile’. In modern times the idea might be expressed by the statement that a thought cannot be regarded as standing in an external relation to what it is a thought of; I discuss whether the idea of an internal relation as implied here is not a cheating attempt to have it both ways, to speak of a relation but to avoid the consequences of doing so. Here also comes in Aristotle’s idea that the mind is not anything until it has something in it. It would be a strange idea of a vessel whose existence consisted in there coming to be something in it; in short it is clear that in spite of certain expressions he is not thinking of the mind as a vessel at all. I have reached only negative conclusions on the cognate question.
3. The soul as a substance. All that has become clear to me is that one cannot explain the mental by using such expressions as ‘event’, ‘process’, ‘act’, ‘substance’ and so on, and adding the rider that they are immaterial. I have gone over the present day attack on the philosophical notion of introspection without so far being able to arrive at a clear view of the whole problem – whose ramifications are extremely complex – or to convince myself of a single point: except that I am satisfied that the notion of a private ostensive definition explains nothing. But the arguments that lead me to this push me to unacceptable conclusions about such activities as talking to oneself or calculating in one’s head, about which I have repeatedly written without being able to remove the perplexities what they involve me in – Taking a completely different starting point, I am much interested in Aristotle’s theory of the soul as the form of the body; principally because his approach is neither introspective nor behaviourist; and I have tried to get at what he means by calling the body the organ of the soul as the eye is of sight; but so far have not arrived at any conclusion except that the connexion between an organ and that of which it is the organ is a conceptual one.
4. ‘The subject’, ‘I’. This problem is closely entwined with the others. I write on it with the aim of shewing that the conception of the metaphysical subject of consciousness is both barren and fallacious; but I am never able to get completely free of it. I have written principally on the thought ‘Only an “I” can be an observer’, which involves a consideration of solipsism (‘I am the only observer’) and of Descartes’ ‘Cogito’. Further I discuss Descartes’ assertion that the mind is of all things most intelligible to itself; I have not been able to make up my mind whether the point that he is making is true and trivial (I am satisfied that if it is true it is true only in some trivial sense) or whether it is a falsehood which would be in conflict with e.g. the Augustinian description of the soul as ‘an abyss’ which is ‘dark to itself’. I have tried to go into the meaning of such phrases as this, considering e.g. whether they are explicated by ancient and medieval conceptions of the ‘irrational part’, or by modern pscyho-analytical investigations, whether they have anything to do with empirical or philosophical psychology, with theory of knowledge, and with metaphysics, but though all of these have a certain indirect connexion with this idea of ‘an abyss’ they none of them appear to me to touch it very directly.

These are the interconnected problems with which I am most centrally occupied and on which I have done most writing in the past year. There are others, whose connexion with these is not close, and which are useful for me to investigate principally because I have not got a clear and decisive line on any philosophical problem: if I had on one, I should be in possession of the method that would carry me through all; and the most important thing for me is to discover the kind of considerations and arguments which shall solve my problems. In particular, I am engaged in preparing a paper on ‘The reality of the past’ which I have promised as a contribution to a book of essays in ‘analytical philosophy’ which is to be published from Cornell University next year. I am using this relatively small topic to work out my doubts about what is called analytical philosophy, and expects the conclusions about the methods employed in that manner of philosophizing, to be of direct use for my work on my main subject.

Note

1. G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Mary Somerville Research Fellow Report’ (1948), Somerville College Archive, University of Oxford. © M C Gormally.

PART 1 From Parmenides to Wittgenstein

2 ANSCOMBE’S ARISTOTELIAN METAPHYSICS

Christopher Frey

DOI: 10.4324/9780429198601-4

Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy stands at the intersection of two ostensibly incongruous traditions: (i) a strain of analytic philosophy that originates in Frege and is developed in the work of Anscombe’s teacher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (ii) the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition¹. To chart these two influences in their entirety would be to recapitulate far too much of Anscombe’s thought. But there is a surprising occupant of this Anscombean middle ground that is especially illustrative of her attempt at reconciliation—Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance. This topic is located at the nexus of these movements in two ways. First, Wittgenstein’s influence is manifest in Anscombe’s historical engagement with Aristotle’s theory—in the idiosyncratic interpretation she offers of his metaphysical texts. Second, Anscombe accepts and employs several core elements of Aristotle’s theory of substance throughout her contemporary writings, but these positions are, once again, inflected by her Wittgensteinian commitments. In this essay, I will discuss several aspects of Anscombe’s Aristotelian metaphysics in both its historical and contemporary registers. In doing so, I aim to illuminate how unique the variety of Aristotelianism she adopts is.

Few would describe Anscombe’s attitude towards her philosophical predecessors as hagiographic and Aristotle receives the same kind of sharp and terse dismissals she infamously levels against other historical figures. For example, she claims that Aristotle ‘misconceived the importance of the categorical syllogism’ and that the theory of scientific explanation he builds upon this misconception in ‘his worst book’, the Posterior Analytics, is fundamentally flawed.² More generally, she deems Aristotle’s formal logic ‘to be of no more than scholarly and historical interest’ (7).

But Anscombe’s dismissiveness doesn’t extend to all of Aristotle’s views. In particular, she notes the importance of Aristotle’s metaphysics. She says,

his theory of substance, predication and existence […] seems to be the most fundamental and the most central topic in his philosophy; so much so that, apart from Aristotle’s account of syllogisms and his ethical, aesthetic and political writings, most of his philosophical work can hardly be understood at all without it.

(5)

This acknowledged centrality doesn’t inoculate Aristotle’s metaphysics from criticism. For example, Anscombe confesses that ‘I do not understand Aristotle’s “form”, and I do not yet know whether he got clear about it himself’ and her response to Aristotle’s claim that matter and form are the same, the former in potentiality and the latter in actuality, is simply that ‘this is still Greek to me’.³

But there is much in Aristotle’s theory of substance that Anscombe finds compelling.⁴ I will focus on her understanding of three of the theory’s central elements: Aristotle’s conception of substance as he presents it in the Categories (§1), Aristotle’s account of matter and its role as a principle of individuation (§2), and the concept of essence (§3).

1 Categories and substance

Consider the totality of things that we can sensibly say about a subject, for example, a particular human being: ‘She is a human being’ (or ‘She is an animal’), ‘She is six feet tall’, ‘She is tanned’, ‘She is twice the height of her desk’, etc. According to Anscombe, there are ‘significant logical differences between’ the ‘fairly simple kinds of things […] that might be said about a subject’ and it is these logical differences that ground Aristotle’s list of categories: substance, quality, quantity, relation, etc. (15).

What is it for predications, or what they signify, to be significantly logically different from (or significantly logically similar to) each other? Elsewhere, Anscombe calls the sense of logic at issue here grammar. To understand something’s grammar is to grasp its ‘structure’, ‘general form’, or ‘logical shape’.⁵ Something’s logical/grammatical form is manifest in the intelligible statements in which it can figure, the reasonable questions we can ask about it, and the appropriate answers someone can give in response to such questions. As an example, Anscombe notes that ‘[a] quality of a body like “white” or “hot” differs from a quantity in that, for example, you can ask whether it is white or hot all over, whereas such a question hardly makes sense for predications of quantity’ (15). There are presumably dozens of similar differences and, if they collectively meet some threshold of significance, they warrant our making a categorial distinction. To possess the grammatical understanding that would constitute knowledge of what a category is, one has to be fluent in the linguistic practices that surround the relevant variety of predication. This grammatical understanding is the common possession of those who can competently participate in the practice of making such sensible statements and asking and answering such questions intelligibly. Indeed, this grammatical understanding constitutes the practice itself and gives the statements, questions, and answers their unique senses.

Is Aristotle’s list of categories, or any such list, complete? Why these ten categories? Why not additional categories, e.g., weight or shape? Anscombe’s appeal to a threshold of significance for the logical difference is (appropriately) imprecise and she is consequently pessimistic that we can answer these questions clearly and determinately. If this is correct, then ‘it looks a hopeless task to construct a complete list of categories’ and Anscombe concedes that Aristotle’s doctrine is, at best, ‘a relatively crude sketch’ (15, 16).⁶ Nevertheless, ‘the idea of a category-difference […] is certainly a useful one’ and Anscombe appeals to the logical differences we find between Aristotle’s preferred categories to elucidate central features of his theory of substance (15). We can see this if we follow Anscombe and contrast her interpretation of Aristotle’s account of substance with a broadly Lockean view that she opposes.

The Lockean account of substance goes hand in hand with the rejection of nominal essences for individuals and comprises two principal commitments.

(L1) One can (re)identify a proper name’s referent without identifying it as being some kind or other.

(L2) Simple, non-relational predicates signify qualities.

Aristotle and Locke agree that particular substances (what Aristotle calls first substances) are subjects of p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Report to the Mary Somerville Fellowship Committee, May 1948
• Part 1 From Parmenides to Wittgenstein
• Part 2 Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind
• Part 3 Ethics, religion, and politics
• Index