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Anscombe on Brute Facts and Human Affairs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

Rachael Wiseman
Rachael Wiseman*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Anscombe writes: ‘It is not profitable at present for us to do moral philosophy. It should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’. In consideration of this Anscombe appeals to the relation of ‘brute-relative-to’ which holds between facts and descriptions of human affairs. This paper describes the reorientation in philosophy of action that this relation aims to effect and examines the claim that this reorientation makes possible the sort of philosophy of psychology that can provide a starting point for ethics.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 87: A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch , July 2020 , pp. 85 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020

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References

1 Vogler, Candace, Reasonably Vicious (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002), 45ffGoogle Scholar.

2 Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957; 2nd edition, 1963), 1Google Scholar.

3 See Geach's, PeterMental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957)Google Scholar for a Fregean analysis of the proposition that treats concepts in this way, viz. as abilities rather than representations. Note that Geach, Anscombe's husband, was writing this book while Anscombe was writing Intention and ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’.

4 Frege, Gottlob, ‘The Thought: A Logical Enquiry’, Mind 65: 259 (1956), 289–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Op. cit. note 4, 289.

6 Op. cit. note 4, 289.

7 This characterisation of the way in which the Fregean idea manifests in Wittgenstein's later work is indebted to Diamond, Cora, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1995)Google Scholar. See esp. 4–6.

8 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Practical Inference’ (1972), Reprinted in her Human Life, Action and Ethics (Imprint Academia, 2005), 109–147Google Scholar. 110.

9 This is a reference to the imagined society in Anscombe's ‘The First Person’ (in Guttenplan, Samuel D. (ed.), Mind and Language (Oxford University Press, 1975), 45–65Google Scholar) who lack self-consciousness and the capacity for intentional action. See Wiseman, Rachael, ‘What am I and What am I Doing’, Journal of Philosophy 114: 10 (2017), 536–550CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an expanded discussion of this point.

10 See, Thompson, Michael, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Diamond, Cora, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, Philosophy 53:206 (1978), 465–479CrossRefGoogle Scholar for different ways of showing, in this spirit, that human is not an empirical concept.

11 Wiseman 2017. Op. cit. note 9.

12 Op. cit. note 2, 8.

13 Op. cit. note 2, 8.

14 We can always extend our concepts to include the activities of humans and children. Sometimes this extension is one we are compelled to make because we have discovered new facts. For example, learning about the complex social relations that exist among the higher primates may convince us that certain kinds of behaviour really is ‘supplying’. Sometimes the extension is an ‘as if’ extension, as when we apply to our pets descriptions that their form of life can clearly not sustain (‘The cat is negotiating with the dog about who gets to sleep in the basket’). Sometimes the case falls between the two, and here exists the space for conceptual innovation, aspect shifts, moral transformation and poetry.

15 Compare the discussion of the concept of length in G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The Question of Linguistic Idealism (1976), reprinted in her From Parmenides to Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 112–134. 117.

16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, esp. §§138–242.

17 See op. cit. note 2, 50 and op. cit. note 8 for further discussion.

18 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33:124 (1958), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Op. cit. note 18, 1.

20 Op. cit. note 18, 3–4.

21 Op. cit. note 18, 3–4.

22 Op. cit. note 18, 4.

23 Foot, Philippa, Theories of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 11–12Google Scholar.

24 Op. cit. note 2, 1.

25 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Rules, Rights and Promises’ in her Ethics, Religion and Politics Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 332Google Scholar.

26 Midgley, Mary, ‘Is “Moral a Dirty Word?’, Philosophy 47: 181 (1972), 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Midgley generously attributes this idea to Foot, Philippa, ‘The Philosopher's Defence of Morality’, Philosophy 27 (1952), 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Thanks to audiences at the University of Oxford, University of Liverpool and at the Royal Institute of Philosophy for helpful questions and comments. This paper would not have been possible without the benefit of Clare Mac Cumhaill's generous insights and stimulating conversation over several years.