Table Of ContentTHEC OLLECTED
PHILOSOPHIPCAAPLE ROSF
G.E .M .A NSCOMBE
VOLUMTEW O
Metapahnytdsh iec s
Philoofs oMpihnyd
BasBilla ck·w eOlxlfo rd
Byth sea maeu thor
Intention
An Introduction to Wittgemtein 's Tractatus
Three Philosophers (wiPteht Geera ch)
© in this collection G. E. M. Anscombe 1981
Fint published in 1981 by
Basil Blackwell Publisher
108 Cowley Road
Oxford OX4 1JF
England
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
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Bridsh Library Cataloguing In Publication Data
Anscombe, Geruude Elizabeth Margaret
The collected philosophical papers of G. E. M. Anscombe
Vol. I: Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind
1. Philosophy, English -Addres,es, essays,
lectures
I. Title
191'.08 81618
ISBN 0-651-11951-4
Type,et in Photon Baskerville
Contents
Introduction vii
PART ONE: The Philosophy of Mind
1 The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature 3
2 The First Person 2 1
3 Substance 3 7
4 The Subjectivity of Sensation 44
5 Events in the Mind 57
6 Comments on Professor R. L. Gregory's Paper on Perception 64
7 On Sensations of Position 7 1
8 Intention 7 5
9 Pretending 83
10 On the Grammar of'Enjoy' 94
PART Two: Memory and the Past
1 1 The Reality of the Past
u Memory, 'Experience' and Causation
lllO
PART THREE: Causality and Time
13 Causality and Determination
14 Times, Beginnings and Causes
15 Soft Determinism
16 Causality and Extensionality
1 7 Before and After
18 Subjunctive Conditionals 196
19 "Under a Description" 1!08
20 AnalyJiJ Competition -Tenth Problem l!l!O
21 A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis's Argument that "Naturalism" is
Self-Refuting
Index
Introduction
My first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topic of causality. I didn't
know that what I was interested in belonged to philosophy. As a result of my
teen-age conversion to the Catholic Church -itself the fruit of reading done
from twelve to fifteen -I read a work called Natural Theology by a nineteenth
century Jesuit. I read it with great appetite and found it all convincing except
for two things. One was the doctrine of .scientia media, according to which
God knew what anybody would have done if, e.g., he hadn't died when he
did. This was a part of theodicy, and was also the form in which the problem
of counter-factual conditionals was discussed. I found I could not believe
this doctrine: it appeared to me that there was not, quite generally, any such
thing as what would have happened if what did happen had not happened,
and that in particular there was no such thing, generally speaking, as what
someone would have done if ... and certainly that there was no such thing
as how someone would have spent his life ifhe had not died a child. I did not
know at the time that the matter was one of fierce dispute between the Jesuits
and the Dominicans, who took rather my own line about it. So when I was
being instructed a couple of years later by a Dominican at Oxford, Fr
Richard Kehoe, and he asked me if I had any difficulties, I told him that I
couldn't see how that stuff could be true. He was obviously amused and told
me that I certainly didn't have to believe it, though I only learned the
historical fact I have mentioned rather later.
But it was the other stumbling block that got me into philosophy. The
book contained an argument for the existence of a First Cause, and as a pre
liminary to this it offered a proof of some 'principle of causality' according to
which anything that comes about must have a cause. The proof had the fault
of proceeding from a barely concealed assumption of its own conclusion. I
thought that this was some sort of carelessness on th� part of the author, and
that it just needed tidying up. So I started writing improved versions of it;
each one satisfied me for a time, but then reflection would show me that I
had committed the same fault. I don't think I ever showed my efforts to
anyone; I tore them up when I found they were no good, and I went round
asking people why, if something happened, th would be sure it had a cause.
ey
No one had an answer to this. In two or three years of effort I produced five
versions of a would-be proof, each one of which I then found guilty of the
same error, though each time it was more cunningly concealed. In all this
time I had no philosophical teaching about the matter; even my last attempt
was made before I started reading Greats at Oxford. It was not until then
that I read Hume and the discussion in Aquinas, where he says that it isn't
part of the concept of being to include any relation to a cause. But I could not
understand the grounds of his further claim, that it is part of the concept of
coming into being.
viii lntrod1 .ction
The other central philosophical topic which I got hooked on without even
realizing that it was philosophy, was perception. I read a book by Fr Martin
J ., of
D'Arcy, S. called The Nature Belief and got just that out of it.I was sure
that I saw objects, like packets of cigarettes or cups or ... any more or less
substantial thing would do. But I think I was concentrated on artefacts, like
other products of our urban life, and the first more natural examples that
struck me were 'wood' and the sky. The latter hit me amidships because I was
saying dogmatically that one must know the category of object one was
speaking of -whether it was a colour or a kind of stuff, for example; that
belonged to the logic of the term one was using. It couldn't be a matter of
empirical discovery that something belonged to a different category. The sky
stopped me.
For years I would spend time, in cafes, for example, staring at objects
saying to myself: 'I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I
see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' While still doing Honour
Mods, and so not yet having got into my undergraduate philosophy course, I
went to H. H. Price's lectures on perception and phenomenalism. I found
them intensely interesting. Indeed, of all the people I heard at Oxford, he
was the one who excited my respect; the one I found worth listening to. This
was not because I agreed with him, indeed, I used to sit tearing my gown into
little strips because I wanted to argue against so much that he said. But even
so, what he said seemed to me to be absolutely about the stuff. The only book
of
of his that I found so good was Humt'J Theory the External World which I
read straight on from first sentence to last. Again, I didn't agree with some of
it; he offered an amended account of identity to rewrite Hume, in a way that
seemed to me to miss the force of Hume's thoughts about identity as seeming
to be "midway betwixt unity and diversity": he wanted to amend Hume into
starting with the idea that identity really belonged just to atomic sense
impressions -which won't work because "every sense-impression contains
temporal parts"; and then changing to the conception of "identical" as
applying always to a whole, having temporal parts or spatial parts or both,
and never to a single indivisible entity, if such there be. That is, he wanted to
smooth Hume out. But he was really writing about the stuff itself, even if one
did not accept his amendment. It was he who had aroused my intense interest
in Hume's chapter "On scepticism with regard to the senses".
I always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. I couldn't see my
way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties
about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. 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 havegotthiJ, and I define 'yellow' (say)asthiJ" being effec
tively attacked. -At one point in these classes Wittgenstein was discussing the
interpretation of the sign-post, and it burst upon me that the way you go by it
is the final interpretation. At another I came out with "But I still want to say:
Blue is there." Older hands smiled or laughed but Wittgenstein checked
lniroductiun IX
them by taking it seriously, saying "Let me think what medicine you
need ....S uppose that we had the word 'painy' as a word for the property of
some surfaces." The 'medicine' was effective, and the story illustrates
Wittgenstein's ability to understand the thought that was offered to him in
objection. One might protest, indeed, that there is thij wrong with Locke's
assimilation of seconda qualities to pain: you can sketch the functioning of
ry
''pain" as a word for a seconda quality, but you can't do the reverse opera
ry
tion. But the 'medicine' did not imply that you could. If "painy" were a
possible secondary quality word, then wouldn't just the same motive drive
me to say: "Painy is there" as drove me to say "Blue is there"? I did not
mean "'Blue' is the name of this sensation which I am having," nor did I
switch to that thought.
This volume contains the earliest purely philosophical writing on my part
which was published: the criticism of C. S. Lewis' argument for 'the self
refutation of the Naturalist' in the first edition of his book, Miraclej, chapter
111. Those who want to see what the argument was, without relying on my
criticism for it, should take care to get hold of the first edition ( 194 7 ).T he
version of that chapter which is most easily available is the second edition,
which came out as a Fontana paperback in 1960.T he chapter, which in 1947
had the title "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist", was rewritten and is
now called "The Cardinal Difficulty of the Naturalist ".T he last five pages of
the old chapter have been replaced by ten pages of the new, though a quota
tion fromj. B.S . Haldane is common to both. Internal evidence shows that
at least some of the rewriting was done after the first Sputnik and even after
the hot d summer of 1959.B ut I should judge that he thought rather hard
ry
about the matter in the interval. The rewritten version is much less slick and
avoids some of the mistakes of the earlier one: it is much more of a serious
investigation. He distinguishes between 'the Cause-Effect becau.ie' and 'the
Ground-Consequent becawe', where before he had simply spoken of
'irrational causes'.I f what we think at the end of our reasoning is to be true,
the correct answer to "Why do you think that?" must use the latter becauje.
On the other hand, every event in Nature must be connected with previous
events in the Cause-and-Effect relation. ... "Unfortunately the two systems
are wholly distinct" .... And "even if grounds do exist, what exactly have
they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological
event?"
These thoughts lead him to suggest that being a cause and being a proof
must coincide - but he finds strong objections to this. (He obviously had
imbibed some sort of universal-law determinism about causes. )After some
consideration he reverts to the ( unexamined) idea he used in the first edition,
of 'full explanation': "Anything which professes to explain our reasoning
fully without introducing an act of knowing, thus solely determined by what
is known, is really a theo that there is no reasoning. But this, as it seems to
ry
me, is what Naturalism is bound to do." The remaining four and a half pages
are devoted to an elaboration of this.U nluckily he doesn't explore this idea
X Introduction
of 'an act of knowing solely determined by what is known', which is ob
viously crucial.
Rereading the argument of the first edition and my criticisms ofit, it seems
to me that they are just. At the same time, I find them lacking in any recogni
tion of the depth of the problem. I don't think Lewis' first version itself gave
one much impression of that. The argument of the second edition has much
to criticize in it, but it certainly does correspond more to the actual depth and
difficulty of the questions being discussed. I think we haven't yet an answer to
the question I have quoted from him: "What is the connection between
grounds and the actual occurrence of the belief?"
The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has
these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the
Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his
friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much.
Neither Dr Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor
Professor Jack Bennett remembered any such feelings on Lewis' part. The
paper that I read is as printed here. My own recollection is that it was an
occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis'
rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate.I am inclined to
construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends -who seem
not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter-as
an interesting example of the phenomenon called "projection".
Part One
of
TheP hilosMoipnhdy
1 The Intentionality of Sensation
A Grammatical Feature
lntrotional ObjectJ
Berkeley calls "colours with their variations and different proportions of
light and shade" the "proper" and also the "immediate" objects of sight.'
The first at any rate long seemed obvious to everyone, both before Berkeley
and since his time. But Berkeley's whole view is now in some disrepute.
Sense-data, a thoroughly Berkel an conception given that name by Russell,
ey
have become objects of ridicule and contempt among many present-day
philosophers.
That word "object" which comes in the phrase "object of sight" has
suffered a certain reversal of meaning in the history of.philosophy, and so
has the connected word "subject", though the two reversals aren't
historically connected. The subject used to be what the proposition, say, is
about: the thing itself as it is in reality-unprocessed by being conceived, as
we might say (in case there is some sort of processing there); objects on the
other hand were formerly always objects of-. Objects of desire, objects of
thought, are not objects in one common modern sense, not indivdual
things, such as the obectJ found in the accuJed man'J poclt.etJ.
1
I might illustrate the double reversal by a true sentence constructed to
accord with the old meanings: subjectively there must be some definite
number of leaves on a spray that I see, but objectively there need not: that is,
there need not be some number such that I Jet that number ofleaves on the
spray.
When Descartes said that the cause of an idea must have at least as much
formal reality as the idea had objective reality, he meant that the cause must
have at least as much to it as what the idea was of would have, ifw hat the idea
was of actually existed. The "realitaJ objectiva" of an idea thus meant what we
should call its "content" -namely what it is of, but considered as belonging
purely to the idea. "What a picture is of" can easily be seen to have two
meanings: what served as a model, what the picture was taken from -and
what is to be seen in the picture itself, which may not even have had an
original.
Thus formerly ifs omething was called an object that would have raised the
question "object of what?" It is hardly possible to use the word "object" in
1 Throughout this paper I use double quotes for ordinary quotations (and so singies for
quotes within quotes) and singles I use aa scare quotes.
From R. J. Buder (ed.), Anal,tical Pltilosop'9, second series (Oxford, 1965).
