Elizabeth Anscombe, the grammatical method and metaphysics

Contemporary analytic philosophers often remember Elisabeth Anscombe for two major contributions, both dating back to the late Fifties: her short book Intention and her essay Modern Moral Philosophy . They are two complex works, in which the dense philosophical prose of Anscombe struggles with subtle distinctions and elusive philosophical problems. The former grounded current debates in the philosophy of action and is still a fundamental reference in the literature. The latter changed the history of contemporary ethics and reset the landscape of the field by beginning a new mainstream, virtue ethics. The importance of those works is beyond question, but the almost exclusive attention to them perhaps obscures a set of important, mutually connected theses that Anscombe held and that set the premises of her views on action and on the virtues. She has developed some of those theses in the sixties and seventies. Her later work is not as widely read and discussed as the writings from the fifties that I have mentioned, but it deserves equal consideration. This essay recalls two of the less-known theses of Anscombe and some of their connections: Anscombe’s’ development of Wittgenstein’s grammatical method and her attitude toward naturalism and metaphysics. To me, these views seem part of an important heritage that Anscombe left to analytic philosophy in general and to ethics in particular. They also seem keys that let us better understand her work on action theory and on virtue ethics.