G. E. M. Anscombe
British philosopherWikipedia
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Search complete. 55 mentions across 14 episodes found for "G. E. M. Anscombe".
Oct 7, 2026
Matt RupertHOST
And we just don't have that kind of accuracy.
Matt RupertHOST
Elizabeth Anscombe, a British philosopher, made this point in 1958 in a paper called Modern Moral Philosophy.
Matt RupertHOST
She argued that the willingness to contemplate, however reluctantly, doing anything at all, if the consequences favor it, is itself a moral corruption.
Matt RupertHOST
The person who says, I would not torture a child, but I can't rule it out if the stakes were high enough.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
I mean, I wanna come to this thing about attention, though, and Buberian attention, the I-thou attention that you mentioned.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
So for me, so Murdoch makes it very clear, and it's clear also here that she's influenced by someone like Anscombe, that moral philosophy needs a, she calls it a philosophical psychology.
John VervaekeGUEST
Mm-hmm.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
It needs, uh, it needs to make sense in the light of what we know about mentation and cognition.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
I mean, I want to come to this thing about attention, though, and Booberian attention, the I-thou attention that you mentioned.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
So for me, so Murdoch makes it very clear, and it's clear also here that she's influenced by someone like Anscombe, that moral philosophy needs a, she calls it a philosophical psychology.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
It needs to make sense in the light of what we know about mentation and cognition.
Darius Parvizi-WayneGUEST
And she uses Freud, although she calls Freudianism an embryonic muddle at one point.
Jason JonesHOST
You know, as strange as, I shouldn't probably ever say that out loud.
Jason JonesHOST
Those were my four great, but then as a Catholic, it was Sheen and Chesterton, Elizabeth Anscombe, greatly influenced me.
Jason JonesHOST
And Elizabeth Anscombe also was probably with Sheen, I can't think of any other influential voices in the world that were condemning Truman for dropping the bomb.
Jason JonesHOST
And they were both very devout Catholics.
Jason JonesHOST
And Elizabeth Anscombe in many ways was like Hannah Runt.
Jason JonesHOST
She was very quirky, wonderful.
Jason JonesHOST
Beautiful woman, you know, very interesting.
Yoel InbarHOST
Um, and, uh, people, the smarter they are, the better they are at coming up with a logical justification for their preexisting intuitions.
Yoel InbarHOST
But it's funny because, uh, I used to assign the famous Anscombe article on virtue ethics-
Josh GreeneGUEST
Mm-hmm
Yoel InbarHOST
... um, to my undergrad class.
Stephen DarwallGUEST
It's great to be here.
August BakerHOST
So why don't we start with Anscombe's challenge? What was Anscombe's challenge?
Stephen DarwallGUEST
Anscombe's challenge, made in this famous broadside of hers, Modern Moral Philosophy, which was published, I think, by Philosophy in 1958, was that modern mo- moral philosophy was in the grips of a law conception of ethics, unlike that of the ancient Greeks, for example, uh, which was about virtue and the good.
Stephen DarwallGUEST
And she thought that any such conception would be unintelligible unless you grounded it in divine legislation.
Stephen DarwallGUEST
And, you know, there are many modern moral philosophers who have believed in God, and many of those have been theological voluntarists that has believed that it takes God's command to constitute or posit morality.
Stephen DarwallGUEST
But that's not really the question here.
Stephen DarwallGUEST
This is sort of an historical question.
Stephen DarwallGUEST
So really what Anscombe was down on was what we could call deontic morality, or what Bernard Williams calls morality as opposed to ethics, or what Alan Gibbard called morality in the narrow sense.
David RuncimanHOST
So to start with, I think we should establish the ways in which for the early part of her life, maybe even for the first half of her life, nearly, she was primarily a philosopher.
David RuncimanHOST
She was born the same year as Elizabeth Anscombe, just a few months later.
David RuncimanHOST
Similar background.
David RuncimanHOST
She was born in Ireland.
David RuncimanHOST
Different college, Somerville.
David RuncimanHOST
Different subject to start with English, but then change to greats, which is the one that includes philosophy.
David RuncimanHOST
Was it basically the same... story, the same formation in a way as Elizabeth Anscombe?
Nikhil KrishnanGUEST
Oh, with a very important difference that she did not convert to Catholicism.
Adrian DuncanGUEST
And he wrote these two in his lifetime fascinating books with slightly completely different views of language.
Adrian DuncanGUEST
Anyway, I came across one of these smaller books that was translated by a woman called Elizabeth Anscombe, who's an Irish, she was born in Limerick, an Irish philosopher who studied in Oxford and then studied in Cambridge under Wittgenstein.
Adrian DuncanGUEST
And she was one of the sort of executors of Wittgenstein's estate.
Adrian DuncanGUEST
And most of his books came out after his death.
Peter HowardGUEST
Because without this, there's so many things that make you say, well, I don't really think, Peter, that's that realistic.
Peter HowardGUEST
But most of those reasons, or 99% of them, they're always on a horizontal plane.
Peter HowardGUEST
And until you can, and this is the thing, I think every effort that's happening today, and of course we see with AI too, and I use it for stuff, for business, but it's to depersonalization of a civilization.
Peter HowardGUEST
And there's a lot of times where I catch myself doing my prompts and things because, you know, it helps even preparing for things like this too, organizing.
Peter HowardGUEST
And It's like, I want to say, like, I'm texting somebody like, thanks for this.
Peter HowardGUEST
Or would you please look this? I'm like, why am I talking to this thing like this? We don't even realize, you know, what's, how, how much, how strong this anti- personalization of society is.
Peter HowardGUEST
And that's why I keep going back.
Peter HowardGUEST
And Sheen said this in his autobiography.
David RuncimanHOST
We have three philosophers to go, all of them, as it happens, women.
David RuncimanHOST
And today, I'm gonna be talking to the philosopher and author Nikhil Krishnan about the life and thought of Elizabeth Anscombe.
David RuncimanHOST
G.E.M. Anscombe was the name that she wrote under.
David RuncimanHOST
She was the literary executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
David RuncimanHOST
She was a Catholic moralist, and she was a fierce opponent of consequentialism, the idea that what matters is simply what happens.
David RuncimanHOST
She lived the life of someone who believed that was a wicked idea.
David RuncimanHOST
Nikhil, the philosopher we're talking about today, Elizabeth Anscombe, G.E.M. Anscombe, also someone who published using initials, I think, because that was the convention rather than to conceal the fact she was a woman.
David RuncimanHOST
She was born in 1919, so about a decade after A.J. Ayer, J.L. Austin.
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