Professor Elizabeth Anscombe remembered

Professor Elizabeth Anscombe, who held the chair of philosophy at the University of Cambridge between 1970 and 1986, died on 5 January 2001. A memorial service will be held on the morning of Saturday 24 February at the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Hills Road, Cambridge.

Professor Anscombe attended Sydenham High School where she converted to Roman Catholicism. From there she went to St Hugh's College, Oxford, graduating with a first in Greats but by this time she had been lured to Cambridge by the lectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whom she developed a close friendship and working relationship. She was to make the journey between Oxford and Cambridge twice more in her career, returning to Oxford from 1946 - 1970 to a research fellowship followed by a teaching fellowship at Somerville, which she resigned in 1970 to come to Cambridge as Professor of Philosophy and Professorial Fellow of New Hall, typically choosing a college which was non-traditional.

One of three scholars to be nominated as Wittgenstein's literary executor, she produced a translation of what is probably his greatest work, the Philosophical Investigations and wrote An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tracatus (1959).

The influence of Wittgenstein can be seen clearly in her book Intention (1959), long considered a classic in the philosophy of mind, in which she critiqued philosophers' conception of knowledge. Subsequent papers presented further challenges to traditional conceptions of free will and causality; in her paper The First Person she argued that the word "I" does not refer to anything.

Her three-volume Collected Philosophical Papers (1981) ranged across epistemology, history of philosophy, metaphysics and philosophy of religion but one of her major contributions was in the field of moral philosophy. In her 1958 paper Modern Moral Philosophy she argued that the field's concern with moral obligation and moral duty, what she termed the "law conception of ethics", was outdated and should be replaced by a return to Aristotelian ideas of virtue and practical reasoning.

She was never afraid to express her own moral convictions: the mother of seven children, she was a strong opponent of contraception; while in 1939 she argued that it would be morally wrong for Britain to go to war because the war was not just, and after the war she and two colleagues at Oxford opposed the conferment of an honorary degree on the former President of the USA, Harry Truman, on the grounds that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was murder.