Foreign thinker
Elizabeth Anscombe
Elizabeth AnscombeEthics and philosophy of mindBritish1919–2001
“Intention, action, and moral reasoning are central to understanding human life.”
Life and Thought
Elizabeth Anscombe was a British philosopher and one of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Through her works in ethics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind, especially her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” she played an important role in reviving virtue ethics and reexamining Aristotelian thought in contemporary philosophy.
Elizabeth Anscombe was born in 1919 in Ireland and studied at the University of Oxford. She was a student and later a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and after Wittgenstein’s death she played an important role in translating and publishing some of his works, including Philosophical Investigations.
Anscombe is regarded as one of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Her famous essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” published in 1958, offered a fundamental critique of modern ethical theories such as utilitarianism and Kantian deontology and brought renewed attention to virtue, moral character, and Aristotle in contemporary philosophy.
She also made major contributions to the philosophy of action. Her book Intention is a classic work in this field, and her analysis of intention, human action, and the distinction between reasons and causes had a profound influence on philosophy of mind and action theory. Throughout her academic life, Anscombe wrote on causation, truth, ethics, religion, and philosophy of language, remaining one of the central figures of the analytic philosophical tradition.