See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/363405518

Anscombe’s Wittgenstein

Article · August 2022

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190887353.013.31

CITATIONS READS

0 83

1 author:

Joel Backström
University of Helsinki
21 PUBLICATIONS 83 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Joel Backström on 28 January 2023.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Anscombe’s Wittgenstein
Joel Backström
(Published in Roger Teichmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe. Oxford University Press, pp. 415–
441)

1. Introduction
Elizabeth Anscombe first met Ludwig Wittgenstein when attending his lectures at Cambridge in 1942. The
teacher-student relationship evolved into a close friendship lasting until Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, with
Wittgenstein for a time living in an upstairs room in Ansombe’s house. 1 As one of three Literary Executors
named in Wittgenstein’s will, Anscombe played a key role in presenting his thought to the world by bringing
out editions of his unpublished writings, starting with the Philosophical Investigations in 1953. Furthermore,
as the translator of many of these works, originally written in German, Anscombe gave Wittgenstein his
English writer’s voice. When reading Wittgenstein in English we are, very often, reading Anscombe.
This chapter doesn’t discuss these aspects of the Anscombe-Wittgenstein relationship, however. 2 Instead, it
examines two closely intertwined themes: Anscombe’s understanding of Wittgenstein’s thinking, and his
influence on hers. I begin by sketching Anscombe’s general sense of Wittgenstein’s thought and of his
influence on her, and her view of his philosophical ‘method’, which she doesn’t want to call quite that
(sections 2 and 3). Then, I trace his pervasive influence in her writings on intention, the first person, and
certain problems about meaning, viewing these as unified by a Wittgensteinian critique of the subject-
object paradigm of thought (sections 4 and 5). After showing the connection between Anscombe’s seminal
paper ‘Modern moral philosophy’ and Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of metaphysical illusions, I close by
discussing Anscombe’s and Wittgenstein’s respective approaches to the question of truth in religion, which
are perhaps not as far apart as might initially appear (sections 6 and 7).

2. A veiled face
According to Anthony Kenny, Anscombe once said, “I don’t have a single idea in my head that wasn’t put
there by Wittgenstein” (Kenny 2019, 19). A striking statement, but hardly surprising. Any philosophically
inclined person who spent years talking with someone like Wittgenstein would unavoidably have their
thinking deeply and indelibly formed by his. Anscombe’s daughter Mary Geach reports her mother saying
that, really, neither she nor her contemporaries “who called themselves philosophers were […]
philosophers”; when asked who was, “she named Wittgenstein” (GG3, xiii). Anscombe herself writes of an
initial phase of “besotted reverence”, where “almost anything that Wittgenstein said sounded true and
important to me, except for some things about religion”;
But it is not entirely true, since I argued with him a good deal in philosophy. Sometime I plain did
not understand what he was saying, and then I more or less had to leave it alone; sometimes I
understood his sentences but could not understand the reasons for them and that was where I had

1
On the personal relationship, see Monk 1991 (see ‘Anscombe’ in the index); cf. also Geach 1988, Leach 2020, 5-6; 9-
10.
2
On Anscombe’s work as literary executor, see Backström (forthcoming), Erbacher 2016, Erbacher & Krebs 2015,
Gibson 2019.
 the most instructive arguments of my life. But once I understood I was inclined to be convinced.
(AW, 35)
This kind of “overwhelming influence [...] which makes something seem convincing because it is part of X’s
teaching” is a bad thing, Anscombe says, for then one isn’t really thinking for oneself, and she “soon began
to struggle against it”, telling herself “I had no right to think something which impressed me in this way; I
had got to be able to think whatever I could really claim to think in, so to speak, a dull way, and with
reasons which I could give and which ought to be visible as having point and force to minds that had not
suffered that great impression” (AW, 35-6). This may explain Anscombe’s free use of Wittgensteinian ideas
without explicit acknowledgement of their source; taking her debt to Wittgenstein for granted, she tries to
understand the ideas themselves; make their significance clear by putting them to work. As we’ll see,
Wittgenstein’s influence is indeed evident across her writings, in matters great and small – and also in the
way she writes about other philosophers. Volume One of her Collected Philosophical Papers is subtitled
From Parmenides to Wittgenstein, but the order of development in her own thinking appears to have been
the reverse. “It is a very striking fact about Wittgenstein’s thought”, she wrote in a letter to G. H. von
Wright, “that he reverts to problems of Greek philosophy, and one of the things for which I am grateful to
him is that he has caused me to read Plato and Parmenides with more understanding” ( LvW, n.d., 1948). As
she told Mary Geach, the past masters had seemed to her like “beautiful statues”, but the vitality of
Wittgenstein’s thought “had brought them alive for her” (GG3, xiii).
While Anscombe had learnt from Wittgenstein, he remained an enigma to her. In a letter to Paul Engelmann
in 1958, she writes:
I must confess that I feel deeply suspicious of anyone’s claim to have understood Wittgenstein. That
is perhaps because, although I had a very strong and deep affection for him, and, I suppose, knew
him well, I am very sure that I did not understand him. It is difficult, I think, not to give a version of
his attitudes, for example, which one can enter into oneself, and then the account is really of
oneself: is for example infected with one’s own mediocrity or ordinariness or lack of complexity…
(Engelmann 1968, xiv)
Anscombe often expresses this sense of not really having understood Wittgenstein the man or his thinking.
For example, about Philosophical Investigations §108, where Wittgenstein discusses the central difference
between the Tractatus and his later understanding of philosophy, and says the task is “turning our whole
examination round [...] about the fixed point of our real need”, Anscombe asks: “But what [...] did he mean
by ‘the fixed point of our real need’? I do not know, and I suspect that without understanding this we shall
at best have a poor understanding of that book [the Investigations]” (KE, 211; cf. ST, 179). Speaking of the
contrast between the impression made by the Tractatus and the Investigations, she says:
[F]rom the Tractatus as it were a face looks out very clearly. With Philosophical Investigations I at
least have the impression of a veiled face, or one which does not appear strongly. Strange contrast!
In the Tractatus it is said that what is shown cannot be said – there is something that our sentences
try to speak out but gulp on. Yet the Tractatus seems to succeed in saying what, according to it,
‘can’t be said’. The Investigations insists that it is an error to think that there is something that can’t
be said, and yet it seems often to be nearly revealing something which yet does not come into
view... (FWW, 192)
Anscombe says that she
[O]nce heard someone ask Wittgenstein what it all came to, what was, so to speak, the upshot of
the philosophy he was teaching in the 1940s. He did not answer. I am disposed to think that there
 wasn’t an answer he could give. That, namely, he did not think out a total position as in writing his
first book; that, rather, he was constantly enquiring; some things he was pretty sure of, but much
was in a state of enquiry. I therefore deprecate attempts to expound Wittgenstein’s thought as a
finished thing. [...] Predictions of ‘what Wittgenstein would say’ about some question one thought
of were never correct. (LW, 169)
This passage need not imply that Anscome thought Wittgenstein should have laid out a ‘total position’, or
that he was trying, but failed to do so. In fact, he disputes the very idea of taking ‘positions’, ‘total’ or ‘local’,
in philosophy (cf. PI §118; 126-9), as also the idea that philosophy has discreetly demarcated ‘topics’,
treatable in isolation.3 Rather, one must learn to find one’s way through a whole landscape of life and
confusion; “the very nature of the investigation”, Wittgenstein says, “compels us to travel over a wide field
of thought criss-cross in every direction […] The same or almost the same points [are] always being
approached afresh from different directions” (PI, Preface). Thus, “[p]roblems are solved (difficulties
eliminated), not a single problem” (PI §133). The individual problems aren’t of interest just in themselves,
however, but because “each one casts light on the correct treatment of all” (Z §465); the aim is to “see
connexions” between them and to get an ever clearer overview of the whole (PI §122). Rather than
searching for a ‘position’ to occupy, then, Wittgenstein seems to show us ways of moving about thinkingly
in the landscape of our life and understanding. In his classes, Anscome says, he “sometimes said he was […]
giving examples of ‘five-finger exercises’ in thinking” (LW, 169).

3. Against method
Anscombe’s frank acknowledgement of not really understanding Wittgenstein makes one suddenly aware of
the strangeness of the self-certainty among many of his commentators, who tend to convey the impression
that they understand him, or at least what they present as the essence of his teaching, perfectly. Yet such
claims to understand are often misunderstandings – as one can say even without any claim to a perfect
positive understanding of one’s own. In Anscombe’s view, the logical positivists certainly misunderstood the
Tractatus, which they thought they followed. In her 1959 book An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
she tried to show that “empiricist or idealist preconceptions”, and the focus on epistemological questions
characteristic of modern philosophy generally, were “a thorough impediment to the understanding” of that
book, which is rather concerned with the problems of meaning that exercised Frege and, before him, Plato
and other ancient philosophers (IWT, 12-13/GG4, 4-5). 4 She thought the positivists’ misunderstanding of
early Wittgenstein was paralleled in “the indirect influence of Wittgenstein’s later work [...] through
derivative schools such as the Oxford ‘linguistic school’”, which misunderstood it.5 Both schools tended to
believe that Wittgenstein had provided a simple method for making philosophy as hitherto known obsolete:
the ‘verification principle’ in the positivists’ case; the idea that ‘meaning is use’ and that philosophical
difficulties can be cleared up by simply describing the ordinary use of linguistic expressions in the case of
ordinary language philosophers.
3
Anscombe, however, seems at times to have been drawn to a “separate topics” approach to philosophy, including in
her work as editor of Wittgenstein, most notably in her view of the material she edited as On Certainty in 1969 as “a
single treatise on a single topic” (LvW, September 13, 1967); a view contested by her fellow literary executor Rush
Rhees. For further discussion, see Backström (forthcoming), and cf. Anscombe’s somewhat different later assessment
of On Certainty, quoted in section 7.
4
Space doesn’t permit discussing the details of Anscombe’s hugely influential, but also criticised Tractatus-
interpretation. This is the aspect of her Wittgenstein-understanding that has been most discussed in the literature;
indeed, one might almost say, the only aspect that has been discussed in any depth. Diamond (2019) is a recent book-
length study.
5
Anscombe to Chadbourne Gilpatric, Oct. 18, 1955, quoted in Leach 2020, 14.
The Tractatus, especially TLP 6.53, suggested to the positivists a “quick and easy way of dealing with
‘metaphysical’ propositions” by asking “what sense-observations would verify and what falsify them? If
none, then they are senseless” (IWT, 150/GG4, 125). The problem with this reading of the Tractatus,
Anscombe observes, is that there’s “nothing about sensible verification” in the book, and no “suggestion of
a general method for criticizing sentences” in the verificationist way (IWT, 150/GG4, 125).6 “The general
method that Wittgenstein does suggest” for such criticism is, she says, “that of ‘shewing that a man has
supplied no meaning [or perhaps: ‘no reference’] for certain signs in his sentences’ [TLP, 6.53]”, and such
criticism “could never be of any very simple general form; each criticism would be ad hoc, and fall within the
subject-matter with which the sentence professed to deal” (IWT, 151/GG4, 125-6). Anscombe illustrates
what this might mean with an example “from Wittgenstein’s later way of discussing problems”; an example
Tom Stoppard later used it in his play Jumpers:
[Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think
that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?’ I replied: ‘I
suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have
looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’ (IWT, 151/GG4, 126)
This exemplifies Wittgenstein’s genius for staging surprise attacks that, through a sudden reversal of
perspective, reveal his interlocutor’s preconceptions and blind spots; his comments could, as Anscombe
puts it, “open the ground up before one’s feet, quite suddenly” (AW, 6). It also illustrates how easily we
confuse our everyday ways of speaking with a quasi-theory, which may then need correction by scientific
theory. To say that the sun moves across the sky is unproblematic as long as we speak non-theoretically, but
this doesn’t licence the move to a geocentric cosmology, for if we view both the earth and the sun as
‘heavenly bodies’ related to each other in a system of such bodies, the sun’s ‘movement’ could equally be
an appearance caused by the earth’s movement as vice versa. More generally, the example illustrates how
philosophical difficulties arise not from explicit theoretical commitments, but, as Wittgenstein says, from
our having committed ourselves without realising it to “a particular way of looking at the matter” (PI §308),
which then leads us into bewildering dead-ends – or again, as in this case, makes what isn’t clear at all seem
plain and obvious.
In 1953, during the heyday of ‘linguistic analysis’, Anscombe remarked on how citing the supposed ‘ordinary
use’ of expressions, a habit people had picked up from later Wittgenstein, played a rhetorical role similar to
references to ‘verification’ for the positivists. She thought this confused;
[T]he objection ‘but the word is not used like that’ […] which has acquired such dogmatic force in
philosophical discussion […] ought […] never to be used unless it is clearly shewn how, for the
particular problem in hand, some particular feature of a use is essential to a meaning. […]
Wittgenstein […] is always saying ‘look at the use!’ But it is in fact a difficult thing to do; and it is
very easy to think that one is doing it by attending to unimportant features: a procedure which he
once compared to describing a naval lieutenant in terms of the stripes on [his uniform.] (BBC, 235) 7
Against both positivism and ordinary language philosophy, Anscombe insists that Wittgenstein didn’t
provide easy solutions for philosophical perplexity. On the contrary, he “made one feel that it was very
6
Anscombe records that, “hearing people speak of ‘the verification principle’, [Wittgenstein] exclaimed ‘Who is
supposed to have invented that?’ and when it was indicated that it was attributed to him, he said ‘ What? Me?’” (KE,
208). – Cf. the statements by Wittgenstein quoted in Klagge 2019, 17-18.
7
This relates to Anscombe’s impatience with J. L. Austin’s brand of linguistic analysis, evident in her response (P) to his
piece on pretending. Kenny says that Anscombe and Austin “detested each other cordially”; “she [...] would say
scornfully that she expected any day that some student would report [...] that Austin had discovered a difference
between ‘enough’ and ‘sufficient’” (2019, 17).
difficult to look in the right direction”; he “often seemed to understand one’s philosophical thoughts and
problems better than one did oneself. One would say what one thought, then he would amplify it, make it
seem more convincing, carry it deeper – and then undo it” (AW, 13; 7). While Wittgenstein’s contribution
does lie in his way of doing philosophy, no real ‘method’ can be extracted from his writings or teaching;
It is quite commonly said that Wittgenstein taught, not a doctrine, but a method of doing
philosophy. This is unluckily in an important sense not true. If someone teaches a method, it ought
to be possible for someone else both to learn and to teach it: it ought to be quite clear what the
procedure is, what moves you make at what points, and so on. Now it is possible perhaps to list a
number of tricks which Wittgenstein used and, therefore, taught. E.g., that of asking ‘As opposed to
what?’ or ‘and what would it be like if it were not so?’ when a proposition is advanced. Or that of
asking ‘What is the picture that is being used here?’. Or that of taking a solution in a peculiarly
literal, empirical sense. Or that of inventing different cases which shew quite clearly that the
implication of a term or the meaning of a statement is not determined in advance in some way in
which one thought it was. Or that of asking ‘To whom is this said, and in what circumstances?’ or
‘What kind of proposition is this?’. Or that of assuming a criterion of identity of a kind suggested by
a philosophic thesis and deducing absurd consequences. Or that of asking what would shew that a
word had a certain sense if you had to learn the language it belonged to without interpreters. I
could go on. But none of these moves, nor all of them taken together, guarantee that anybody will
find a solution to any problem at all. There is no method taught by which you know when such and
such a move will be fruitful, carry you deeper, cause you really to touch the nerve of the problem
under consideration. These tricks can be played with complete superficiality. Nothing takes the
place of having ideas, of being capable of observation and insight; and Wittgenstein did not I think
teach a method of attaining these. When he makes one of these moves it has great point; but he
does not teach you when it will have point to make a given move. (BBC, 234)8
When put plainly like this, the point is obvious. Of course philosophical problems cannot be clarified by
applying set formulas, as it were feeding ‘the problem’ into a machine – and there is a problem to clarify
only insofar as someone has a problem, as machines don’t. And yet, the point is constantly missed, as
illustrated by the positivists and the ordinary language philosophers. One could also say: the reason why
there cannot be a method in philosophy is that, as we saw, philosophical difficulties are created by
commitments to ways of thinking of which we aren’t aware and that, Wittgenstein suggests, we don’t even
“want to see”, which is why “what is most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand” (CV, 25,
transl. modified). Methods can only solve problems you’re willing to admit you have, but in philosophy, the
hard thing is precisely admitting this; “It is not a difficulty for the intellect but one for the will that has to be
overcome” (CV, 25). – We’ll return to this crucial point below.

4. The subject-object paradigm

Let’s now turn to Wittgenstein’s substantial influence on Anscombe’s thinking. In order not to get lost in a
mass of details, I will consider this under one particular aspect: a reorientation of the approach to
philosophical problems away from the dominant subject-object paradigm of philosophical thought, and
towards a focus on what happens between human beings. I see that reorientation as the most radical
aspect of Wittgenstein’s later work, although it isn’t part of standard interpretations, or anyway isn’t given
the sense I’ll try to indicate, and Anscombe never explicitly formulates it as I will. Nevertheless, I’ll try to
8
All quotation-marks within the quote have been changed to single; in the original they are first double, then single,
for no obvious reason.
show that it unifies central themes in her writings. The dominant conception Wittgenstein criticises sees
questions in terms of a subject’s relation to an object of some kind, and so effectively models our relation to
ourselves and to each other on our relation to things. Thus, it populates the world with thing-like mental,
logical and other ‘entities’, the presence of, and ‘facts’ about which supposedly account for the most basic
dimensions of human life – whereas the subject-object framing actually makes these dimensions disappear
from view or appear only in incomprehensibly paradoxical form. Anscombe’s writings on personal identity
and intention, and on private ostensive definition and certain problems about meaning – three central
topics of hers that I’ll focus on – show just this, or at least that’s o ne way of seeing them as belonging
together. Hopefully, looking at Anscombe’s thinking in this light also helps get this theme in Wittgenstein
into clearer focus.
Subject-object thinking dominates philosophical debates about ‘the self’. ‘The subject’ itself is taken to be
some kind of object – “Being able to mean ‘I’ is […] explained as having the right sort of thing to call ‘I’” (FP,
25) – and then failure to find this imagined object gives rise to scepticism about personal identity . As
Anscombe notes in ‘The first person’, the debate is “self-perpetuating [...] so long as we adhere to the initial
assumption [...] that ‘I’ is a referring expression”; an assumption shared both by those who “have not
perceived the difficulty” with whatever is proposed as the supposed ‘self-object’ referred to (a body, a
Cartesian ego, some properties of a brain, etc.), and those who have “and are led to rave in consequence”
(FP, 32). The debate is dissolved, Anscombe says, by the realisation that when I say that I’m doing, feeling,
or thinking this or that, ‘I’ is not used “to make a reference, at all” (FP, 32). I’m not somehow identifying my
‘I’ (or ‘self’) as the object referred to; if there were such an act of identification, I might mistakenly refer to
your ‘self’ instead of mine – but that’s nonsense. As Anscombe notes, the very fact that “getting hold of the
wrong object is excluded [...] makes us think that getting hold of the right object is guaranteed” by the
extraordinary nature of the object (a Cartesian ego, say), when really “there is no getting hold of an object
at all” (FP, 32). Anscombe doesn’t mention this in her paper, but her basic argument can be found in
Wittgenstein, perhaps best expressed in the Blue Book (BB, 66–70; cf. PI §404-11; WL46/7, 47).
Obviously, one can mistake oneself for another or another for oneself in a certain sense. Thus, I might
mistakenly think a childhood photograph of you shows me as a child. But in making the mistaken
identification, pointing to the photograph and saying “That’s me!”, I don’t first have to identify myself as the
speaker, I simply speak. As Wittgenstein put it: “The man who cries out with pain, or says that he has pain,
doesn’t choose the mouth which says it” (BB, 67–8; cf. Anscombe’s FP, 29). This reveals the radical
difference between the two senses of self-relation in play. The relation to myself manifest in my speaking,
which is eo ipso a relation to others, those I address in speaking, is not the relation to any object; not to my
‘self’, my ‘mind’ or my ‘body’, conceived ‘objectively’. Moving my tongue to speak isn’t like moving an
object; intending to move my tongue, I cannot inadvertently move yours, as I might inadvertently move
your car instead of mine. Anscombe puts the point by noting that while “This is my body” might be said to
mean that “My idea that I am standing up [say] is verified by this body, if it is standing up”, and while
observation of my body may, in special circumstances, perhaps under the influence of hypnotic suggestion,
reveal that I was mistaken to think I was standing up, “observation does not show me which body is the one
[is mine]. Nothing shows me that” (FP, 34, emphasis added). For how do I know that that very body is the
one for me to observe, the one whose position in this case falsifies my sense that I am standing up? And,
again, do I first, in order to make the observation, have to decide which eyes (namely: mine) to direct at
that body? When I act, whether physically or in thinking something to myself, my basic relation to myself,
including to my body, is not that to an object at all.
This brings us to the topic of intention. In a 1954 letter to von Wright, Anscombe acknowledges
Wittgenstein as the source of the most basic idea of her best known book, Intention (1957). She writes that
reflecting on “the discussion of ‘Tun’ and ‘wollen’” (doing and willing) in §611 ff. of Philosophical
Investigations, “together oddly enough with” her reading Aristotle’s Ethics, “has got me on to a [...] very
interesting line about ‘how does one know what one is doing?’ – when e.g. one is writing a letter”; “I want
to say that I know what I do as I know what I say. That is, not from the facts at all” (LvW, n.d., but just before
Easter, 1954). The “connexion with Aristotle”, she explains, was through his notion of practical reasoning,
whose conclusion “isn’t made true by the considerations leading to it” but “by my doing whatever it is”,
which means that “the truth in question” is not “something shewn to the intelligence that arrives at it”
(ibid.). We don’t conclude that we’re doing X from observation of any kind, introspective or otherwise, nor
from an acceptance of the premises of our deliberative argument. Rather, insofar as we deliberate about
what to do – in contrast to simply acting, without deliberation, as we often do – our resolving to act is itself
the ‘conclusion’. And, of course, even theoretical reasoning is a practical activity, a mode of action; one isn’t
observing conclusions somehow forming, but draws them.9 Saying this would be trivial were it not, again,
for the domination of subject-object-thinking, and the “utter darkness” into which we’re plunged by what
Anscombe calls its “incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge” (I, 57). This presents an intention
as a kind of quasi-object – a mental or brain-state – from recognising or registering which I know what I
intend. Here, as in the case of the self, the object-conception engenders the absurd consequence, pointed
out by Wittgenstein, Anscombe notes (I, 6), that it would be possible to mistake one’s intention for some
other, in the way one can make a mistake in executing it. I can mistakenly pick up your book instead of mine,
but I cannot mistakenly think I intend to pick up mine when I really intend to pick up yours. 10
Following Wittgenstein, Anscombe reorients the discussion of intention. One cannot see an intention or
intentional action by looking “into the contents of [the agent’s] mind”, at “the movements of muscles or
molecules”, or at anything else that “can be determined about the man by himself at the moment [of
action]” (I, 9; 29). If contemptuous words go through my mind as I greet someone, for example, this doesn’t
by itself show that my greeting is secretly contemptuous, unless I mean those words, silently direct them at
the other as signs of contempt (I, 48-9). In intending, as in remembering, imagining, etc., at issue is not
what passively, object-like, is in my mind, but what I actively, with understanding, do. If there is something
in my mind, say something that somehow ‘feels like’ a memory-image, I still have to judge that things were
as the image represents them for this to be remembering. But, Anscombe asks, echoing Wittgenstein, “if
one can judge ‘Things were as this represents them’, why cannot one simply judge ‘Things were thus and
so’ – for example, ‘Jones was there?’” (MEC, 126) Thus, there’s no need for an image or “[some other]
intermediary to have, as it were, the peculiar colour of memory”, and since, even were it there, it wouldn’t
make a memory, the ‘object-like’ intermediary “drops out of the analysis, and the causality […] is between
the original witnessing of the event and the present thought […] of [the person who] knows that such-and-
such occurred”; this, Anscombe says, “is an original phenomenon of causality: one of its types – whether or
not anyone has yet classified it as such” (MEC, 126-7; cf. Wittgenstein’s remarks at, e.g., Z §610 and PI
§213). However, the dominance of subject-object-thinking makes this causality – a human being who tells
9
In Intention, Anscombe discusses these points, e.g., at pp. 49-54 (non-observational knowledge), and 56-89 (practical
knowledge/reasoning).
10
Wittgenstein brings out the absurdity in the ‘observational’ conception of knowledge of one’s intention (e.g., in
imagining) by asking: “Would you say: ‘I see a man with white hair etc., I suppose I’m imagining N but perhaps it’s only
someone who looks very much like him’?” (PO, 455). – Of course, one can be confused or self-deceived about one’s
intentions, but what one then self-deceptively refuses to acknowledge, or is simply confused about, is something one
knows without observation, with the mediation of no thing. And being confused is different from making a mistaken
identification; it’s more like a general breakdown of orientation (cf. the discussion of poor confused ‘Baldy’ at FP, 36).
us what she remembers, with no thing intervening or deciding this for her – appear impossible, and the fact
that someone remembers something immediately gets reinterpreted as a matter of finding “a definite thing
that happens” somehow in her; whether in her mind or brain, doesn’t matter (MEC, 128, emphasis added).
My action in forming an intention, remembering, saying something, etc., doesn’t consist in some ‘purely
interior’ act of meaning or intending, to which my ‘outer’ behaviour would be only contingently ‘attached’;
an idea whose confusion Anscombe, again following Wittgenstein, ably demonstrates, and to which we’ll
return (cf. I, 28-9; 42-4; 47-9). It is rather a matter of how I concretely relate myself to others in the situation
where I act. This is the import of Anscombe’s oft-quoted positive characterisation of intentional actions as
those to which “a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application”; the sense, namely, “in which
the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting” (I, 9). That means: intentions and intentional actions exist
only in the context of our living with, wondering about, objecting to, challenging and explaining ourselves
to, each other. This isn’t to deny the existence or importance of ‘inner’ occurrences, such as mental images
or words that one thinks of without uttering, but to say what – namely, their setting within these
interpersonal relationships – gives these inner occurrences, or for that matter any ‘outward’ performances,
their significance (cf. I, 48-9). We don’t have intentions, and then also happen to ask each other about what
they are; rather, to have intentions in the full human sense is to participate in this life of mutual exchange
and questioning.11 In Anscombe’s words, while it is true that we have a “special interest in human actions”,
one can characterise what that interest is only by giving “a type of description that would not exist if our
question ‘Why?’ did not” (I, 83; cf. I, 34).
Crucially, we question and answer each other not just out of curiosity, or simply for purposes of explanation
or prediction, but out of an essentially moral concern; a concern with “good and evil” (I, 21-4), with our
responsibility for our actions, to each other. “All human action is moral action”, Anscombe says, hence
“‘moral’ does not stand for an extra ingredient which some […] actions have and some do not” (AIDE, 209).
There are morally indifferent action-descriptions – if we’re told only that someone sat down, say, this
doesn’t suggest anything for good or ill – but considering the particular action in concreto means seeing it in
an interpersonal context of moral concern, where what it meant or implied for good or ill is revealed (AIDE,
210; 213-4). For example, the one who sat down may have done so when she should have (concretely)
stood up to someone, so hers was an act of cowardice or resignation. And in cases where the sitting down
really was indifferent, that too can be seen only in the light of moral concern, which reveals acts as
significant or indifferent. Anscombe underlines the essentially interpersonal character of this concern: “the
single human individual” in relation to whom one acts, e.g., who suffers the consequences of one’s action,
“occupies a pre-eminent position in questions about good and bad action” (AIDE, 218). 12
Anscombe’s remark that ‘moral’ doesn’t denote “an extra ingredient” of (some) actions, but is rather the
very element in which action has its being, makes explicit the basic insight that orients Wittgenstein’s
discussion of our, to use an inadequate term, ‘psychological concepts’ – and in fact, it seems to me, his
whole later philosophy. Although he doesn’t name it explicitly using the concept ‘moral’, this essentially
moral orientation is the very reorientation away from subject-object thinking and towards the interpersonal
dimension. To see how, let’s briefly consider Wittgenstein’s way of discussing pain, which aims to show that

11
Cf. Teichmann 2015. On Anscombe’s view of animal intentions, see I, 86-7; CP2, 91; UD, 209-10.
12
In light of the ineliminably moral character of ascriptions of intentions and other mental states, Anscombe’s call, in
other places, for developing an adequate “philosophy of psychology” (which for her centrally includes ‘theory of
action’) before moving to ethics (I, 78; MMP, 26; 38), seems clearly untenable. That is, it can amount only to an
arbitrarily drawn line between philosophical reflections, such as her remarks on taking pleasure in cruelty, or on the
need to see what one intends as in some sense good (I, 73; 75), that, while manifestations of moral understanding, are
not called ‘ethics’, and others that are (cf. I, 75-6).
our recognition (understanding) of pain cannot be conceived as, basically, an epistemological matter in
which we determine whether a mental ‘thing’, pain, is present in the other, with ‘moral concerns’ entering
only secondarily, in our caring (or not) about the pain we’ve registered. Wittgenstein turns things around:
the “most primitive form” of recognition of the other’s pain is “a reaction to somebody’s cries [...] a reaction
of sympathy [...] We comfort him, try to help him” (PO, 381). As he says, if someone has a pain in his hand,
“one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face” (PI §286). To focus, in one’s
theoretical search for the essence of pain, on ‘the pain’, that ‘object’ one imagines is there to be registered
in the sufferer’s mind or brain, is like focusing on the bruised hand, disregarding the person whose hand it
is. Bandaging the hand or dampening the pain by administering pain-killers is indeed of interest to us – but
only given that we care about and pity the sufferer. This is moral concern insofar as it is precisely a caring-
for-the-other. This caring concern creates a ‘field’ of possible, morally charged responses: compassion,
cruelty, negligence, etc. In the absence of that concern, why would the other things (bandaging, etc.) be of
any interest at all – or if they were, what would show this to be an interest in pain? Now Wittgenstein
formulates an apparent objection to his way of discussing pain: “Yes, but there is something there all the
same accompanying my cry of pain. [...] And this something is what is important” (PI §296). In response, he
agrees that there’s no greater difference than that between being in pain and just pretending, behaving as if
one were, and so naturally he doesn’t want to say that there’s ‘nothing there’, no pain. So he says the pain
“is not a something, but not a nothing either”; the point being that we cannot escape such paradoxical
formulations until we “make a radical break” with the idea that we always think and speak about objects of
some kind or other (PI §304). We don’t just refer to objects. More basically, we respond to each other in the
various modes of moral concern, whether in comforting the sufferer or asking the one who made her suffer,
“Why?”13

5. Closing the myth-making factory

The protest, “Yes, but there is something there all the same” (PI §296), voices the most primitive conviction
of subject-object thinking – although this doesn’t yet tell us why that conviction arises, what is tempting
about it. The conviction doesn’t just concern pain; at stake is the feeling that, as Anscombe says, my
experience “gives me, shows me, an object”, and that
Such […] objects are my sole direct cognitive connection with the world. If it is a pain, for
example, it acquaints me indirectly with my body; it itself is an object of direct acquaintance.
“There is something there!” I want to say. Such objects are not independent of the
experiencing subject, but given that they are being experienced, they exist [… and] all my
knowledge of empirical reality depends on my having these objects. (POD, 249)
One of the first great philosophical lessons Anscombe learnt from Wittgenstein – supposing it makes sense
to think of it being permanently learnt – was to see through this idea, or fantasy. She was captive to it in the
form of phenomenalism, which she “hated […but] felt trapped by”; she couldn’t see how to get, say, from
seeing a yellow expanse (which seemed undeniable) to knowledge that it was a pack of cigarettes – “I
couldn’t see my way out of it but I didn’t believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it […] 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” (CP2, viii; cf. POD, 244).

13
For more on the essentially ethical, interpersonal or ‘I-you’-perspective arguably at the core of Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy, and of human understanding as such, see Nykänen (2018) and Backström (2019a).
This myth of private ostensive definition can be ‘read’ from the subjective or the objective side, either ‘I
know what I mean’ or ‘the object tells me what it is’; the amalgamation of these two sides of the subject-
object-perspective creates the paradoxical idea of the private, i.e. subjective object. What Wittgenstein
shows is that the myth is indeed a myth, a confusion.14 As Anscombe puts it, it can seem to me that I know
what my object of experience is simply by privately attending to and ‘naming’ it (say) ‘A’, only because I
“already know what an A is, or what sort of thing is to be called an ‘A’” (POD, 256). For there’s no such thing
as attending to a mere, undefined ‘this’; you may attend to a sound, say, and name it, but then you have
already decided that you’re attending to a sound, and you can call that sound ‘A’ only if you have “a
technique of using ‘A’”, a way of determining what ‘that’ sound is, what else, if anything, is to be called the
same sound;
[But h]ow can this that I am attending to tell me all of that or determine any of it? […] This? What?
There has to be an answer to that, and that is why the answers to the questions are already
determined […] in my approach to the object; and that is why it is a fraud to think that the object,
uncharacterised by such determination, can fix them. I already know. So I am not fixing what I mean
by ‘A’. Or if I am fixing it, it’s just the last point that I am fixing. ‘A’, say, is to be a name of a piece in a
game – that I know, and now I say it is this piece. (POD, 255)
How is it that I already know these things? By having learnt a language; not a private language only I can
speak, whatever that would mean, but the language I learnt in growing up, surrounded by people who
spoke to me and in whose conversation and life I joined. The drama of meaning isn’t played out between
me, the subject, and ‘my’ object, as in philosophising we’re apt to imagine (cf. PI §38), but between us, as
we talk to each other about various objects. – So, are we now to say, as Wittgenstein-commentators often
imply, that this explains everything? That I couldn’t define things, fix the meaning of words for myself, but
others could do it for me, and when I had got my fixes from them, from ‘the community’, I could then go on
applying that knowledge to further cases? But how would others be any more able than I to fix meanings?
Could my parents just point and say “This is yellow”? How would I know what they meant, any more than I
would know what I myself meant if I just ‘pointed in my mind’? Would I not here, again, need to know what
was pointed to; a colour, not the object so coloured, for example? Indeed I would, and so a community of
language users seems just as unable as the solitary individual to fix the meaning (reference) of words.
No wonder, then, that the “ancients and medievals had a problem whether and how teaching is possible […]
Is it possible for one human being to teach another?” (WRPL, 240) Wittgenstein, Anscombe says, made an
important “contribution to that discussion” by emphasising that “the teacher cannot succeed in teaching
unless the pupil has certain reactions which he is not obliged to have and which the teacher can’t teach
him; is responsive in certain ways in which he does not have to be” (WRPL, 240). Consider the slave boy to
whom Socrates teaches geometry by question-and-answer in the famous scene in Plato’s Meno (82b–85b);
a scene Anscombe “became convinced […] was no fiction” when she repeated Socrates’ experiment with a
child who, to her “astonishment and pleasure […] answered just as the slave did” (HE, 33). 15 That children
respond as they do to these questions is, she says, “something that cannot be taught; it is a prerequisite to
teaching” (WRPL, 240). Teaching is possible only against this background: “You can do something which is
called teaching; but he only ends up knowing, if he has had these reactions, not those, in the course of the
teaching. However, what is called teaching does end up, if successful, with the pupil able to do what in a
certain sense he cannot be taught” (WRPL, 240).16 Furthermore, most of what we learn in connection with
being introduced into a life permeated and transformed by language isn’t explicitly taught us even in the
14
Anscombe details where and how at POD, 236-48.
15
Anscombe often returns to this example: see GSE, 217-18; HE, 33-5; LW, 163-4; and UP.
16
Cf. Anscombe’s parallel remarks against ‘method’ in philosophy, above.
apparently paradoxical sense that geometry is taught. For example, “First I thought I would tell him and
then I thought I would not” is an everyday thing to say – but now Anscombe asks: “[H]ow does one learn to
say such things? Perhaps I can show you how to saw a plank; I cannot show you the way to have a thought
like that – so how do you learn?” (WWP, 215) That isn’t a rhetorical question, with an answer too obvious
to state. But neither is it a question expecting an answer; in which direction would we even start looking for
one?
So, really, we cannot say how or why we learn, but we do in fact learn, and teach; our words do have
meaning. Wittgenstein, Anscombe says, doesn’t try to explain how this can be. There’s “no theory of
language in Wittgenstein”; no attempt to show “how noises are significant speech”, to somehow construct
meaning out of, or derive it from, “external relations” between bits of sound, behaviour, etc., starting as it
were from “words without faces” (TL, 203; 193; 200). Instead, Wittgenstein shows that attempted
derivations don’t work, for any arrangement of such bits – say, the ink-marks that you’re looking at on this
page – could be taken in multiple ways, and so they don’t by themselves amount to any meaning at all. But
when you, being literate in English, read them as letters of words saying this-or-that, they do say that; “what
one actually does […] that is what fixes the meaning” (QLI, 122, first emphasis added; cf. Wittgenstein, PI
§454; §139-41). We understand each other and so understand each others’ words; that’s a fact, but our
attempts to explain the fact, or again to justify it, to find a necessity in it, fail.17
Anscombe suggests that this is what is “most difficult to accept” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy (RP, 118).
Philosophy, she says, “is to a great extent a huge factory for the manufacture of necessities”, that is, of
fantasies of “necessary explanations, necessary connections”, and Wittgenstein “arouses a certain hatred
among us” insofar as “[h]e’s out to deprive us of our factory jobs” (WTC, 184). Anscombe is in the factory-
closing business, too. In a discussion clearly Wittgensteinian in inspiration, but containing many original
arguments, she argues for the illusoriness of the pervasive assumption that “causality is some kind of
necessary connection”, so that if A caused B in one case, an A must cause B in every case, unless other
causes intervene (CD; cf. Wittgenstein, PO, 370-411). And the idea of ‘logical necessity’ is just as illusory, she
notes; it isn’t necessitation at all, in the sense of a compulsion to think anything (cf. her PI, 130). To be sure,
there is “the logical must: you ‘can’t’ have this and that […] you must grant this in face of that”; these
concrete ‘must’s’ and ‘cant’s’ are “the more basic expressions in logical thinking” on which our abstract,
metaphorical notions of ‘laws of thought’ are built, just as ‘You can’t move your king’ is “the more basic
expression for one learning chess, since it lies at the bottom of his learning the concept of the game and its
rules” (QLI, 121). However, these ‘musts’ don’t compel like a power ‘from outside’; rather, one might say,
‘logic’ is the form or articulation of what our understanding reveals to us. The slave boy isn’t compelled to
anything through Socrates’ questioning; this is a free moment in his slave-life. Socrates helps him see how
the geometrical figures are related, but it is he who sees; “it was not because he was told, but because he
himself perceived that it was true, that he knew” (UP, 36). There was no necessity that he should see – he
might not have understood – but he didn’t have a choice about what to think once he did understand, since
“I cannot understand a proof and yet not know that it is correct” (UP, 39). This seems paradoxical only
because we model understanding on a situation of being constrained or left free by another, from outside,
which is the wrong picture here.
In terms of the critique of the subject-object paradigm, one could say that Wittgenstein is concerned to
show that there’s no objective necessity – stemming from the side of the objects we deal with – that forces
17
Those who assume that we need and must demand a ‘grounding’ that ‘justifies’ our meaning-claims, will think
Wittgenstein a skeptic about meaning, because he shows our proposed ‘grounds’ don’t actually ground anything. But
as Anscombe underlines, what we find in Wittgenstein is really “a rejection of skepticism”; a rejection of the very
demand for ‘grounding’ (KRPL, 261).
us, as it were independently of ourselves, to understand them as we do. And often, when we th ink
something can only be understood one way – where this isn’t in fact an expression of understanding, but a
blocking of it, a refusal to consider further – Wittgenstein comes up with another possibility, as in his
question about the Sun’s movement. Hence, his Shakespearean motto, “I’ll teach you differences”, or, less
solemnly, “You'd be surprised” (Drury 1984, 157). However, he rejects subjectivism along with objectivism –
they are two sides of a false coin – and if we’re tempted to imagine that we can understand things however
we like, he reminds us of how our knowing and understanding anything at all depends on the grace of
nature, and ourselves, not starting to behave in crazy ways; lumps of cheese or other everyday objects
“suddenly [starting to] grow or shrink for no obvious reason”, for example (PI §142). And if that were to
happen, how would you know whether it was you or the world that had gone crazy? In this sense,
Anscombe emphasises (QLI, 131-3), Wittgenstein is not a “linguistic idealist”, but rather tries to articulate,
as he put it, a “realism without empiricism” (RFM, VI:23; quoted at QLI, 133). ‘The object’, e.g., the ‘sense-
datum’, doesn’t simply come with its own meaning written on it, as naive empiricism supposes, and yet ‘the
subject’, whether individual or communal, cannot just decree or arbitrarily change the meaning of things
either. Rather, how far, and in what way, you and I can understand things, and each other, is for us to find
out, ever anew, by engaging in dialogue about those things. And here, a central concern of Wittgenstein’s is
to show how, in that dialogue, actually making sense of a pretended possibility is much more difficult than
we imagine. This is important, because metaphysics in the critical-diagnostic sense he gives the term is the
creation of illusory possibilities no less than of illusory necessities. A striking example is analysed in
Anscombe’s paper ‘Modern moral philosophy’, to which we now turn.

6. The fake sense of corrupt minds

Unlike the rest of her philosophy, Anscombe’s writings on ethics and religion may appear (and partly are, I
think) unrelated or even alien to Wittgenstein’s way of thinking.18 Nonetheless, her best known, and most
controversial, thesis in ethics – that the characteristically modern ideas of specifically moral obligations,
wrongs, etc., are “survivals” from a long-since abandoned Christian “law conception of ethics”, and should
be “jettisoned”, because they are “only harmful without it” (MMP, 26; 30) – is clearly, even if she doesn’t
advertise this, a homologue of Wittgenstein’s basic analysis of metaphysical confusion. 19 Paraphrasing
something Anscombe says about Kripke, one might say she is the mother of the thesis, although it was
“begotten in [her] by Wittgenstein” (cf. KRPL, 263). What Anscombe rejects as confused are not everyday
moral responses, say protesting against something as unjust or greedy (MMP, 33), but a specific way of
conceiving ‘morality’. She claims that while belief in God-given moral commandments has all but
disappeared, the special associations, the “special emphasis and […] feeling” of that moral ‘ought’ whose
original sense was “required by divine law”, remain (MMP, 30). Having been “cut off from the family of
concepts from which it sprang”, the word ‘ought’, used in this supposedly ‘moral’ sense, “no longer signifies
any real concept at all”, however; it has only “mesmeric force” (MMP, 32). We have here “the survival of a

18
The focus of this chapter as a whole is on what Anscombe and Wittgenstein share, rather than on what may divide
them – as such an equally legitimate focus for investigation. While I say something about the tensions between their
views on religion in the next section, I won’t discuss such tensions in the case of ethics, where I concentrate on one
main, generally overlooked, Wittgensteinian borrowing by Anscombe. To broaden the discussion would take us too far
afield, partly because just getting clear about what Wittgenstein’s ‘view on ethics’ was, demands a long discussion. The
last scare-quotes signal that, as our earlier discussion suggests, ‘ethics’ doesn’t refer to a clearly bounded ‘topic’, but
rather to sustained reflection on the basic moral and interpersonal dimension of human life and understanding. (For
some discussion of this, in relation to Wittgenstein, see Backström 2018; cf. Nykänen 2018.)
19
Commentators generally overlook or ignore this homology; Conant 1996 implicitly recognises it, however.
concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one”; “all the atmosphere of the
term is retained while its substance is guaranteed quite null” (MMP, 31; 40-1).
Now, this is precisely how Wittgenstein characterises the spinning of metaphysical illusions through our
transferring words from their “original home” in various everyday settings to wholly different, ‘sublimated’
contexts, where we imagine, wrongly, that they still make sense, “[a]s if the sense were an atmosphere
accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every kind of application” (PI §116-7; cf. PI §344-52;
OC §10). Wittgenstein’s endeavour to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI
§116) doesn’t mean simply reverting to everyday ways of talking – that would clarify nothing (BB, 58–9) –
but showing how our metaphysical transferring-manoeuvres create, as Anscombe says, only an
“appearance of meaning” (RP, 114-5). The problem is that the metaphysical uses either cut away the basis
of the everyday use they wish to retain, or remain dependent on the everyday use they wish to repudiate;
either way, they “sin against the grammar of their terms” (HE, 28; cf. Wittgenstein, RPP-1 §548). Thus, in
speaking of ‘moral’ demands in the specific way Anscombe is criticising, we appear to be saying something
gravely consequential because of the lingering association with God’s law – remember, this isn’t an abstract
idea, but the historical reality of the Biblical tradition – even as we not only reject any belief in divine law,
but allow so-called ‘moral principles’ that are absolutely opposed to that law’s actual commandments to
take its place (MMP, 40-2).20
Anscombe’s “complaint” (MMP, 42) against the characteristically modern moral outlook she criticises is
precisely that it defends, or deems in principle defensible, substantial ‘moral judgments’ such as condoning
the murder of innocents as a means to our ends, that are “quite incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian
ethic”, for which actions such as murder were “forbidden whatever consequences threaten”; this, she
thinks, is “the most important fact” about the modern outlook (MMP, 34). It doesn’t merely keep the idea
of the moral law, but without God; rather, it rejects the actual moral judgments that law entailed. Now,
Anscombe suggests that we use the mesmerism, the mere formalism of the ‘moral ought’, precisely in order
to get away from the moral substance of the Hebrew-Christian ethic, especially its refusal to “flatter avarice
and power” as worldly ethical codes do, and its prohibition against “the shedding of innocent blood” (PM,
36). In her view, our willingness to embrace murderous policies such as bombing whole cities out of
existence, or, again, matter-of-course abortions on a mass-scale – to name two modern evils of grave
concern to her21 – shows that we’re losing our sense of “the dignity of human nature”, accepting ever more
easily that “human beings can […] be killed so that others can have the life they think they want” (HV, 198).
This pervasive consequentialist sensibility reveals, she thought, that our minds are becoming “corrupt”;
we’re not simply tempted by evil in particular cases but are losing our sense of the very distinction between
good and evil, and so of anything being a temptation, not just an ‘option’, even if perhaps an ultimately
undesirable one (MMP, 40; 36-7). 22 Anscombe’s claim is that this (substantial) moral corruption and the
20
It might be objected that speaking of divine law is hardly an ‘everyday use’ of words, but itself an extension and
transformation of the everyday notion of human law. Indeed, but the point is that modern moral philosophers bank on
the divine law conception while ostensibly repudiating it, in the same way as ‘metaphysics’ generally (ab)uses everyday
language. – I actually think a divine law conception of ethics has grave problems of its own, but this isn’t the place to
discuss them.
21
See CP3, vii-ix; 51-81; GG1, 243-83; GG2, 214-23; 234-8.
22
The term ‘consequentialism’ was coined by Anscombe to refer precisely to this kind of view, where no ‘option’,
however evidently evil, is excluded in advance, since everything depends on the consequences, whether intended or
merely foreseen (MMP, 36; on the development of Anscombe’s critique of consequentialism and the substantial moral
concerns motivating it, see John Berkman’s contribution to this volume). Anscombe doesn’t claim, of course, that this
is the only form of moral corruption, or that, except for this modern aberration, moral life has tended to be
uncorrupted. She is simply diagnosing the specific features of what she takes to be a dominant contemporary form of
moral corruption. Similarly, to mention a closely related issue, while greed has myriad manifestations and can I
(formal) incoherence or emptiness of the contemporary moral ‘ought’, are, as Olli Lagerspetz puts it, “ two
sides of a coin” (2006, 446). For, as Wittgenstein pointed out, if we’re to speak sensibly “there must be
agreement not only in definitions but also […] in judgments” (PI §241), and if we can take paradigms of evil,
such as murdering innocents, and call them ‘morally good’, our words have lost all meaning, have become
mere formalist vehicles of metaphysical illusion, however solemnly we declare them. 23
I don’t know what Wittgenstein would have thought about Anscombe’s analysis of the ‘moral ought’, but
however that may be, her analysis illustrates how ‘metaphysics’ in his critical-diagnostic sense isn’t confined
to seminar rooms. Morally and existentially false attitudes, which may grip individuals or whole cultures,
generally include upholding illusions of meaning of the same kind as those in metaphysics; one might call
this everyday metaphysics. This is connected to the crucial point – sometimes clearly articulated, but often
left implicit, by Wittgenstein (cf. Backström 2013) – that, while metaphysical claims fail to make coherent
sense, and in this sense are empty, “idling” speech (PI §132), they have important, if ultimately destructive
functions in creating comforting or exciting, apparently self-justifying illusions that allow us to indulge
various fateful tendencies. The illusions are created by systematically (which doesn’t necessarily or even
typically mean consciously) abusing words, phrases and idioms that in other contexts have a good use, by
transferring them to a quite different context where they serve to mischaracterise things and put them in a
false light, as in presenting greed as ‘economic necessity’ or the wish to meddle in people’s lives as ‘moral
concern’. Here, it is crucial to create an atmosphere, characteristic tones and postures of seriousness,
concern, etc., around these false ways of speaking (to others or to oneself in thought).24
Now, insofar as the spirit of a time is characterised by the dominance of collective atmospheres, seeking
philosophical understanding involves struggling to consciously feel and see through the fog, rather than
unthinkingly breathe it – in and out, circulating the same bad air – as Anscombe thought contemporary
moral philosophy did; “conceived perfectly in the spirit of the time [it] might be called the philosophy of the
flattery of that spirit” (OMPCY, 167). As the characterisation ‘flattery’ indicates, there’s not just passive
failure to think here, but an active endeavour to ‘belong’ in the collective movement, the dominant ways of
thinking and speaking and feeling of the times; what Christianity calls worldliness. Wittgenstein explicitly
says what the flattery-quote from Anscombe suggests; that the deepest difficulty of philosophy is this
struggle against one’s own wish to “live with the herd that has created this language [of the times] as its
proper expression” (PO, 185; cf. Backström 2011, 739-44). And this difficulty, we should note, need not only
be there in connexion with obviously morally and existentially charged questions. For example, Anscombe
characterises the false, deterministic conception of causality she criticises as “a bit of Weltanschauung: it
helps form a cast of mind which is characteristic of our whole culture” (CD, 133). She reports once
remarking to Wittgenstein, when they were discussing some topic or other, “But of course everybody

suppose be found in all societies, the modern (capitalist) idea and practice of ‘profit maximisation’ in effect makes
greed into the sole, driving principle of economic life, while simultaneously undermining the very possibility of seeing
anything at all as greedy (it’s all just plain, profit-maximising economic rationality).
23
The fact that we see the evil in killing innocents, say, isn’t merely an effect of our history with the Hebrew-Christian
law-conception, but part of human moral understanding as such (which doesn’t prevent people killing innocents and
making up spurious justifications for it, of course). As Anscombe says, while “the motives, spirit, meaning and purpose
of the moral life of Christians depends on revelation […] the content of the moral law, i.e. the actions which are good
and just, is not essentially a matter of revelation” (AM, 50). Does she prove this? No, but how could one? That would
presuppose a reference to something clearer, more certain, than the evil of this evil, by means of which its evil would
be proven – and what could that be?
24
As Anscombe notes (P, 93), hypocrisy, the pretence, to others and to oneself, to be concerned where, or in a way
that, one really isn’t, “carries with it an implicit demand for respect for an atmosphere evoked by the pretender, which
surrounds not the reality, but the idea of such things as being principled, or cultured, or saintly” – and she aptly
characterises cynicism not as freedom from hypocrisy, but as conscious “pretence of hypocrisy.”
understands that in such and such a way” – to which he replied, “If everybody understands a thing in a
certain way that is sure to be false!” and then quoted Nietzsche: “If something true receives public
acknowledgement, ask in the interests of what lie this has happened” (AW, 47; cf. Backström 2019b).

7. Unfinished business
As the above discussion indicates, the Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy as descriptive and
clarificatory rather than justifying or explanatory (PI §122-33) doesn’t imply the impossibility of critiquing
our ways of thinking, even in quite general and pervasive terms. A widespread misunderstanding that
Anscombe wants to correct is precisely “the impression that Wittgenstein came to think that concepts were
uncriticisable. This tribe has these, another perhaps other ones. Neither is right, or wrong” (ST, 179). This
idea, she says, would make Wittgenstein into “a trivialiser”, which he was not (ST, 179). Rather, he was a
problematiser of simplistic, misleading ideas about what criticising concepts or forms of life involves, and
Anscombe follows him in this. To see how, let’s consider her writings on religion.
Wittgenstein said, enigmatically, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a
religious point of view” (Drury 1984, 79). He told Anscombe that, while he “could not understand the idea
of loving God”, he also thought he “could not be great friends with someone wholly lacking in something
religious” (AW, 2-3). Of Anscombe and another devout Catholic friend, however, he said that, while he
found the “symbolisms of Catholicism [...] wonderful beyond words”, he “could not possibly bring [him]self
to believe all the things that they believe” (Drury 1984, 102; Malcolm 2001, 60). Anscombe, for her part,
told a friend, “On the topic of religion, Wittgenstein is sheer poison” (Kenny 2019, 20). When one reads her
writings on Wittgenstein and religion, however, a much closer, if also undecided, relationship emerges, and
it isn’t Wittgenstein’s own thought, but a certain influence he had on others that she thinks poisonous – but
then his general influence on other philosophers was deemed by her “great and […] bad” (BBC, 234,
emphasis added).25 As Anscombe notes, Wittgenstein detested “rationality, or would-be rationality, in
religion”; he rejected the idea of natural theology, that is, of “attempted reasoning from the objects of the
world to something outside the world”, and generally didn’t want “the jagged edges and spikes” of faith
smoothed out (QLI, 122-3).26 Now Anscombe draws a parallel to a strand in Catholic thinking;
In the Catholic faith, certain beliefs (such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist) are
called “mysteries”; this means at the very least that it is neither possible to demonstrate
them nor possible to show once and for all that they are not contradictory and absurd. On
the other hand contradiction and absurdity is not embraced; “This can be disproved, but I
still believe it” is not an attitude of faith at all. So ostensible proofs of absurdity are assumed
to be rebuttable, each one in turn. Now this process Wittgenstein himself once described:
“You can ward off each attack as it comes” (Personal conversation). But the attitude of one
who does that […] is not that of willingness to profess contradiction. On the contrary. On the
other hand, religious mysteries are not a theory, a product of reasoning; their source is quite
other. Wittgenstein’s attitude to the whole of religion in a way assimilates it to the mysteries:
thus he detested natural theology. But […] what part of this was philosophical (and therefore
25
Wittgenstein himself agreed. Anscombe reports him telling her: “I never produce fire but only superficiality and
sham superficiality [sic!] in people”, and when John Wisdom wrote him, saying “You have changed philosophy”, he
showed her the letter and said “I wish I hadn’t” (AW, 17; cf. Wittgenstein, CV, 70-1).
26
Anscombe says, for instance, that Wittgenstein “did not despise belief in miracles; only ‘rational’ belief in miracles.
He would not despise the man whose taking something as a miracle was a sort of [...] confession wrung from him.
What he could not stand was the suggestion that a reasonable man could see as a matter of reasonable consideration
that such and such miracles happened. He thought this a stupid misunderstanding” (AW, 12).
 something which, if right others ought to see) and what part personal, it is difficult to say.
(QLI, 122-3)
Anscombe’s writings on religion, that is, primarily, on Catholic Christianity, do initially make a rather
rationalist impression, as compared to Wittgenstein’s remarks on the matter (he once told her, “ You may be
able to fill reasoning with religious content; I never could” [AW, 3]). But a closer look reveals Anscombe’s
‘rationalism’ to be decidedly anti-theoretical in its attempt to make sense, as far as she could, but no
further, of the articles of faith. In discussing the belief she shared in the survival of the soul after death and
the resurrection, she thus says that, while the practice of praying for the dead makes it meaningful to speak
of the existence of the dead between death and the resurrection, “the good of philosophy will be to cure us
of the impulse to try and have a theory of the existence of the separated soul” (IS*, 78). In her writings
about belief in miracles and prophecy (PM; HM), she similarly attempts to detach these beliefs from the
‘theories’, metaphysical in roughly Wittgenstein’s critical sense, that have been thought necessary to ‘justify’
them. And in a paper on transubstantiation, Anscombe says that “the mystery of the faith […] is the same
for the simple and the learned […] both believe the same, and what is grasped by the simple is not better
understood by the learned: their service is to clear away the rubbish which the human reason so often
throws in the way to create obstacles” (OT, 112). In her view, it seems, this ‘rubbish’ consists as much in
proposed theoretical ‘justifications’ of faith as in criticisms purporting to show its absurdity; as in philosophy
generally, the urge for metaphysical justifications and scepticism mutually live off each other.
Anscombe also objected to the general, vague respect for religion as a phenomenon typical of educated,
liberal Westerners, who think that “All religions are the same really: they are a lot of different paths to the
same end” – to which Anscombe drily remarks “nice religions, you mean, don’t you?” (PSP, 60) She thought
some followers of Wittgenstein – “I can’t speak for Wittgenstein [himself]” – exemplify a philosophically
sophisticated version of this attitude (PSP, 58). Insisting on the unlikeness of religious language to the truth-
claims of science, and on the personal character of religious belief, the upshot of their view is that there’s
“no such thing as a religion’s being true”; religious belief is “better compared to somebody’s being in love
than to his believing anything true or false” (PSP, 58). She characterises this view as
[A]n expression of [...] the heart of actual historical and present paganism: namely having and
respecting the various worships of many gods and hating the exclusiveness of the true religion. That
exclusiveness branded the ancient Jews as atheists, enemies of the gods. For our philosophic
pagans there is no such thing as the true religion or the true god; the many religions can perhaps be
like many pearls on a string. That one string which each religion may be hung on, is something rich
and significant in the depths of the self. All peoples have gods and it is contemptible to be scornful
of them for this: what matters is whether there is this depth (of religion) in a man’s heart. But the
question is: Why? Why should it matter? (PSP, 60)
This is indeed the question. Otherwise put: what does it mean for me to ‘respect’ someone’s belief if I don’t
think there’s any truth in it? Suppose a philosopher is, in Anscombe’s words, “so very modern” that he
doesn’t think he can “judge a savage’s religion of placating spirits to be a delusion”; confronted with
Christians praying for the dead he will equally not say that they are wrong, “nor yet that he disbelieves their
presuppositions about the existence of those spirits, but only that he does not do any of these things” (IS*,
79, emphasis added). What will this ‘tolerantly respectful’ philosopher say to someone like Anscombe who
actually believes that hers is the true religion? Will not his ‘respect’ suddenly appear patronisingly
disrespectful, like assuring someone who tells you they just witnessed a murder that you ‘respect’ their
viewpoint and the ‘deep seriousness’ with which they obviously treat the matter – but then doing nothing
towards investigating whether what they say is true, whether someone really was murdered? This is,
Anscombe says, a falsely aestheticised, “sentimental” attitude; “like someone who thought he was watching
a play when some real action was going on” (IS*, 74). Crucially, assuming the ‘respectful’ attitude also
serves – and this may be its secret motivation – to protect oneself from the challenge of actually confronting
and engaging with the claims of the believer, thus raising the question of what their possible truth might
amount to for oneself. For these beliefs have effectively been written off as just expressions of personal
inclination, of a “way of life” – a notion whose use, Anscombe notes, “carries [...] connotations both of
satisfactoriness and arbitrariness, nor does it lack the upward-looking glance” (OMPCY, 166). 27
Nota bene, two believers may equally protect each other from challenge by affirming their ‘common faith’,
whose actual meaning, what they supposedly share, is never questioned. So ‘believing’ a religion’s creed or
not need not be a decisive difference. That is, what believing (or not) comes to is an open question, to be
asked ever again, if the faith is to be real faith, or its rejection not unthinking or self-deceived. Anscombe’s
objection to the ‘Wittgensteinian’ pagan’s denial that there can be truth in religion doesn’t imply that it is
clear what ‘truth in religion’ means; the problem is rather that the pagan assumes it is clear what ‘truth’
must mean, and so confidently denies that there can be any in religion. By contrast, Anscombe learnt from
Wittgenstein that one cannot assume one knows what exactly ‘truth’, ‘disagreement’, ‘rejection’, etc. mean
in various contexts; one must try to find out. As she says, “Anyone saying something religious is – or ought
to be (?) – doing something religious in saying [it]”, and Wittgenstein’s question is “What is he doing, saying
that?” (AW, 14) Wittgenstein, she says, “is not moved by the question: Is it true? because to say p is true is
to say p and so the original question remains: what is he doing in saying that?” (AW, 14).
So what can truth mean here? Anscombe insists that religious belief belongs, although it isn’t simply
reducible to, a landscape of interpersonal moral concern. For example, although “the conception of an
immaterial substance […] is a delusive one”, we can sensibly speak of the “the spirituality of the soul” (IS*,
71). What makes “a non-superstitious and non-fabulous belief in spirits” possible, and what provides “the
reason for speaking of the spirituality of the soul” at all, is not, she says, “a quasi-physical common property,
but that human beings are in for a final orientation towards or away from the good”; without this, belief in
the immortality of the soul and the resurrection “would have no significance” (IS*, 82-3; cf. Wittgenstein’s
remarks on the meaning of belief in the resurrection, CV, 38-9). As Anscombe also notes, the “mystical” isn’t
necessarily “out of the ordinary”; thus, “the feeling for the respect due to a man’s dead body: the
knowledge that a dead body isn’t something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up […] is
mystical; though it’s as common as humanity” (CC, 187). None of this, of course, proves the truth of any
particular religious belief; rather, these comments indicate, as it were, the kind of terrain on which religious
beliefs might be made sense of, or again meaningfully criticised.
A central problematic here, connected to the discussion of the previous section, concerns the relationship
between religious belief and collective belonging; the role of saying “I believe X” in the sense of “...as one
of us who believes X”. Wittgenstein remarks that the philosopher isn’t – that is, must constantly fight against
the temptation to become, “a citizen of any community of ideas” (Z §455). In discussing Roman Catholicism
with Drury, Wittgenstein told him, “I like to feel free to discuss anything with anyone I am with”, and when
Drury said he thought he “could be happy working as a priest among people whom I felt shared the same
27
Wittgenstein’s own, very different, attitude to someone (I don’t say: to anyone, a priori) who believed their religion
true in a sense that makes other religions by definition false (there are other senses of true), might perhaps be gleaned
from this recollection of Anscombe’s: “He more than once ticked me off for being ‘cock-sure’. He used to blow me up
for any manifestation of this. – I remember once saying something like ‘What people have had such a history as the
Jews!’ and he said at once, with irritation, ‘What do you know of the histories of all the peoples there have been on
the earth?’” (AW, 11)
beliefs as I have”, Wittgenstein replied: “Oh, don’t depend on circumstances. Make sure that your religion is
a matter between you and God only” (Drury, 1984, 102). So, insofar as a confession of faith implies a
conscious or unconscious limiting of one’s freedom of thought and response to make one fit within the
sensibilities of a community of believers, Wittgenstein would resist it. This isn’t to say that a confession of
faith must imply this, but that whether it does is crucial for the nature of the confession. It is also clear that
refusing (overtly) confessing to any faith in no way protects one from bondage to the collective ‘spirit of the
times’. The struggle to free oneself from bondage to that most powerful ‘community of ideas’ must be
consciously undertaken, and never ends.
In any case, it is clear that, belonging in the same family with moral responses, religious truth-claims are
not, basically, empirical claims that might be scientifically tested, and so religion and science aren’t in
competition; as Anscombe says, “Science can correct only scientific error” (QLI, 125; cf. WWC 228-30). 28
More generally, Wittgenstein underlines that one can sensibly speak of mistakes only where there are, in
Anscombe’s words, “unsatisfied criteria of correctness, criteria which correspond to the intention of the
speaker”; however, one might want to reject or question what someone says for many other reasons than
its being a mistake, seeing it, say, as superstition, madness, or some to oneself alien response to the world
(QLI, 124; cf. WWC, 222; 226). Anscombe emphasises that Wittgenstein’s discussions of these differences in
his last writings is more radical than is usually realised. “[W]e should not regard the struggling investigations
of On Certainty as all saying the same thing”; for instance, “a world-picture is not the same thing as a
religious belief, even though to believe is not in either case to surmise”, and we “cannot get [Wittgenstein]
right, but only commit frightful confusions, by making assimilations” (QLI, 130).
In general, before one pronounces an apparently strange belief false or deluded or senseless – and one’s
own different belief true and sensible – one had better be clear what kind of sense the believer tried, but in
one’s view failed to make: “It is like finding nothing in an author; if one is clear that one understands him,
and judges that there is nothing in him, that is all right; but if one merely finds nothing in him (without
being able to see what is supposed to be in him) then one cannot say ‘Never, in my right mind, will I admire
him’” (IS*, 81; cf. WWC, 223). Anscombe’s sensitive discussion of the case of someone who has the idea
that devils plague him (IS*, 80-1) brings out how difficult it may be to know what to say even about beliefs
that initially seem obviously deluded. The difficulties here are essentially moral, existential and spiritual,
because they concern the way one is able and willing to relate to another person, the one who has the
initially strange beliefs, and as Anscombe rightly notes, over the years, Wittgenstein’s interest seems to have
moved from revealing the nonsense in metaphysical pseudo-claims to the kind of “not making sense” that is
manifest in our difficulties in understanding each other (I, 27). And here, Anscombe insists, Wittgenstein’s
attitude, while inquiring and concerned to understand rather than judgingly dismiss the other – or, rather,
precisely because that was his attitude – is not the tolerant pagan’s, who simply tries to avoid facing
conflicts by bracketing the question of truth. On Anscombe’s view, Wittgenstein doesn’t espouse the
“cultural relativism” of incommensurability; we may have, between two people, “a ‘disagreement in the
language they use’ – but then it really is a disagreement” (QLI, 131, emphasis added).
Viewed from the subject-object-perspective, a disagreement can only be genuinely decided by determining
what is ‘objectively’ the case, whether by finding out the facts, or by inspecting ‘the argument’, conceived
as a kind of logical ‘object’ that has certain features that makes it valid or not. If this cannot be done, there
are only differing ‘subjective’ opinions and inclinations, and the conflict has to be left undecided, or else
‘decided’ by the use of force or manipulation. If there’s no objective necessity to see the situation this way
28
Anscombe (PM, 20-25) and Wittgenstein (CV, 37-8) seem to take quite different attitudes to the question of the
historical truth of the Gospel narratives, however.
or the other, one is subjectively licenced to see it as one pleases. That is, either the disagreement will be
decided ‘from without’, as it were independently of us who disagree – or it won’t be decided at all. Now,
this framing leaves out the most crucial dimension of moral understanding: the task of asking oneself how
one actually understands the situation (which isn’t at all the same as how one might wish to see it), and
how far one can actually understand the other and the other can understand oneself – which may be much
further than one wants to admit, in one’s wish to uphold a self-servingly false view of oneself as different
from, and/or misunderstood and unfairly criticised by the other. As the excellent discussion in Nykänen
(2019) suggests, the subject-object-perspective may be so tempting in life and in philosophy precisely
because it denies or obfuscates this daunting task. However that may be, Anscombe certainly didn’t think
Wittgenstein had said the last word on our difficulties of understanding: “The case of conflict remains
unfinished business” (QLI, 133).
REFERENCES

Writings by Anscombe cited by abbreviations used only in this chapter (for abbreviations of other
Anscombe writings, see general list of abbreviations used in the Handbook, given below)
AW – Anecdotes about Wittgenstein. Typescript made by Luke Gormally of two Anscombe-notebooks
deposited at the Anscombe Archives at U-Penn
BBC – “‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’ – A BBC radio talk by Elizabeth Anscombe in May 1953”. Edited by C.
Erbacher, J. Jung and A. dos Santos Reis. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8(1-2), 2019, pp. 225-240
LvW – Letters to G. H. von Wright. Correspondence deposited at The National Library of Finland, Helsinki

Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s writings

BB – The Blue and The Brown Books. 2nd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969
CV – Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman. Translated by Peter
Winch. Revised Edition of the Text by Alois Pichler. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998
OC – On Certainty. Reprinted with corrections and indices. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von
Wright. Translated by Danis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974
PI – Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Translated by G. E. M.
Anscombe. 2nd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.
PO – Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951. Edited by J. C. Klagge and A. Nordmann. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1999
RFM – Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Edited by G. H. von Wright. R. Rhees and G. E. M.
Anscombe. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978
RPP-1 – Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol I. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright.
Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980
TLP – Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1961
WL46/7 – Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–1947. Edited by P. T. Geach. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Z – Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981

Works by others
Backström, J. (2011). “Wittgenstein and the moral dimension of philosophical problems”. In: O. Kuusela &
M. McGinn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press [pp. 729–752]
Backström, J. (2013). “Wittgenstein, follower of Freud.” In: Y. Gustafsson, C. Kronqvist & H. Nykänen (eds.),
Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture: Wittgensteinian Approaches. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing [pp. 212–244]
Backström, J. (2018). “From nonsense to openness: Wittgenstein on moral sense”. In: E. Dain & R. Agam-
Segal (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought. New York and London: Routledge [pp. 247–275]
Backström, J. (2019a). “Philosophy of mind and/as the repression of interpersonal understanding”. In: J.
Backström, H. Nykänen, N. Toivakainen & T. Wallgren (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan [pp. 231–266]
Backström, J. (2019b). “Pre-truth life in post-truth times”. Nordic Wittgenstein Review, Special Issue 2019:
Post-Truth, 97-130
Backström, J. (forthcoming). “Naked Please! Elizabeth Anscombe as editor and translator of Wittgenstein”.
In: T. Wallgren (ed.), The Creation of Wittgenstein. Bloomsbury
Conant, J. (1996). “Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility”. In: D. Z. Phillips
(ed), Religion and Morality. Houndmills: Macmillan [pp. 250-298]
Diamond, C. (2019). Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press
Drury, M. O’C. (1984) “Some Notes of Conversations with Wittgenstein” and “Conversations with
Wittgenstein”. In: R. Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Engelmann, P. (1968). Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with A Memoir. New York: Horizon Press
Erbacher, C. (2016). “Wittgenstein and His Literary Executors: Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright and
Elizabeth Anscombe as Students, Colleagues and Friends of Ludwig Wittgenstein.” Journal for the History of
Analytical Philosophy 4 (3), pp. 1–39
Erbacher, C. & Krebs, S., (2015). “The First Nine Months of Editing Wittgenstein: Letters from G.E.M.
Anscombe and Rush Rhees to G.H. von Wright.” Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 4 (1), 195–231
Geach, P. (1988). “Editor’s Preface.” In: L. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology
1946–1947, (ed.) P. T. Geach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Gibson, A. (2019). “Anscombe, Cambridge and the Challenge of Wittgenstein”. In: J. Haldande (ed.), The Life
and Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe. Exeter: Imprint Academic [pp. 23-41]
Kenny, A. (2019). “Elizabeth Anscombe at Oxford”. In: J. Haldande (ed.), The Life and Philosophy of Elizabeth
Anscombe. Exeter: Imprint Academic [pp. 12-22]
Klagge, J. (2019). “The Wittgenstein Lectures, Revisited.” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8(1-2), 11-82
Lagerspetz, O. (2006). “Anscombe on the Moral Ought and Moral Corruption.” Philosophical Papers 35(3),
435-455
Leach, S. (2020). “Chadbourne Gilpatric and Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Fateful Meeting.” Nordic Wittgenstein
Review 9 | DOI 10.15845/nwr.v0i0.3568 | Prepublication open review, pp. 1-21
Malcolm, N. (2001). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage
Nykänen, H. (2018). “Wittgenstein’s Radical Ethics.” The European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Available at:
https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/wittgensteins-radical-ethics
Nykänen, H. (2019). “This Thing with Philosophy”. In: J. Backström, H. Nykänen, N. Toivakainen & T. Wallgren
(eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan [pp. 329–362]
Teichmann, R. (2015). “Why ‘Why?’? Action, Reasons and Language.” Philosophical Investigations 38(1–2),
115-32

Works by Anscombe, general list of abbreviations

IWT - An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Hutchinson 1959)
I - Intention (2nd edition; Blackwell 1963 and Harvard University Press 2000 - identical in format)
CP1 - From Parmenides to Wittgenstein: Collected Philosophical Papers Vol. I (Blackwell 1981)
CP2 - Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers Vol. II (Blackwell 1981)
CP3 - Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers Vol. III (Blackwell 1981)
GG1 - Human Life, Action and Ethics (ed. Geach & Gormally; Imprint Academic 2005)
GG2 – Faith in a Hard Ground (ed. Geach & Gormally; Imprint Academic 2008)
GG3 – From Plato to Wittgenstein (ed. Geach & Gormally; Imprint Academic 2011)
GG4 – Logic, Truth and Meaning (ed. Geach & Gormally; Imprint Academic 2015)
ACTP - 'Analysis Competition - Tenth Problem', in CP2
AIDE - 'Action, Intention and "Double Effect" ', in GG1
AM - 'Authority in Morals', in CP3
APSM – ‘Analytical Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man’, in GG1
BF - 'On Brute Facts', in CP3
CA – ‘The Causation of Action’, in GG1
CC - ‘Contraception and Chastity’, in GG2
CD - 'Causality and Determination', in CP2
DHB – ‘Dignity of the Human Being’, in GG1
FP - 'The First Person' in CP2
FWW - ‘On the Form of Wittgenstein’s Writing’, in GG3
GSE - ‘Grammar, Structure and Essence’, in GG4
GW – ‘Glanville Williams’ The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law: A Review’, in HLAE (and GG1)
HE - ‘Human Essence’, in GG1
HJC - 'Hume and Julius Caesar' in CP1
HM - ‘Hume on Miracles’, in GG2
HV - ‘On Humanae Vitae’, in GG2
IS - 'The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature', in CP2
IS* - ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in GG2
JPW - ‘The Justice of the Present War Examined’, in CP3
KE - 'Knowledge and Essence', in GG4
KRHL - 'Knowledge and Reverence for Human Life', in GG1
KRPL - ‘Kripke on Rules and Private Language’, in GG4
LW - ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’, in GG3
M – ‘Morality’, in GG2
MEC - 'Memory, "Experience" and Causation', in CP2
METC - ‘The Moral Environment of the Child’, in GG2
MME – ‘Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia’, in GG1
MMP - 'Modern Moral Philosophy', in CP3 (and GG1)
MOC - 'Must One Obey One's Conscience?', in GG1
MT - 'Making True', in GG4
OMPCY - 'Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?', in GG1
OT - 'On Transubstantiation', in CP3
P – ‘Pretending’, in CP2
PJ - 'On Promising and its Justice, and Whether it Need be Respected in Foro Interno', in CP3
PI - 'Practical Inference', in GG1
PM - ‘Prophecy and Miracles’, in GG2
PMC - 'Parmenides, Mystery and Contradiction', in CP1
POD - ‘Private Ostensive Definition’, in GG4
PPDM - 'Prolegomenon to a Pursuit of the Definition of Murder', in GG1
PSP - ‘Paganism, Superstition and Philosophy’, in GG2
PT – ‘Practical Truth’, in GG1
QLI - 'The Question of Linguistic Idealism', in CP1
RP - 'The Reality of the Past', in CP2
RRP - 'Rules, Rights and Promises', in CP3
SAS - 'On the Source of the Authority of the State', in CP3
ST - ‘The Simplicity of the Tractatus’, in GG3
TAA - 'Thought and Action in Aristotle: What is "Practical Truth"?', in CP1
TBC - 'Times, Beginnings and Causes', in CP2
TD – ‘Mr Truman’s Degree’, in CP3
TKEA - 'The Two Kinds of Error in Action', in CP3
 TL - ‘A Theory of Language?’, in GG3
UD - ' "Under a Description" ', in CP2
UP - ‘Understanding Proofs: Meno, 85d9 – 86c2, Continued’, in CP1
WM - 'War and Murder', in CP3
WRPL - ‘Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language’, in GG3
WTC - ‘Wittgenstein’s “Two Cuts” in the History of Philosophy’, in GG3
WWC - ‘Was Wittgenstein a Conventionalist?’, in GG3
WWP - ‘Wittgenstein: Whose Philosopher?’, in GG3

View publication stats