Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Fun Anscombe facts

I'm looking into Anscombe's life and finding far too much material to fit into one essay. Apparently Anselm Müller is writing a book length biography of her, which should be very good. I'm tempted to write one myself, but perhaps it would be redundant. Anyway, here are some anecdotes that might not make it into my essay:
  • The first time Peter Geach met Anscombe, he proposed to her, thinking she was someone else. (Source--see note 8.)*  
  • Anscombe and a friend once made fish soup in a room that Iris Murdoch was renting, when Murdoch was out. Not only did they ruin a scarf of Murdoch's by using it to strain the soup, they also made such a mess that Murdoch was kicked out of the place. (Source: Peter J. Conradi Iris Murdoch: A Life (W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2001), pp. 264-265.)
  • Anscombe did more to revive interest in just war theory (which is now taught to all cadets at West Point and is close to being officially supported by the US, at least in theory) than any other single person. (So says Anthony Kenny in his essay "Elizabeth Anscombe at Oxford".) 
  • Kenny sometimes had baths at Anscombe's house, during which she would talk to him while sitting on the edge of the tub. (Source: Kenny in The Tablet, 23 March 2019, p. 6.)     
If Kenny is right about Anscombe's role in reviving just war theory then this is a very underappreciated fact. Michael Walzer discusses the "triumph" of just war theory here and does not mention Anscombe (as far as my quick scan revealed). He identifies the Vietnam War as the reason for renewed interest in Just War, which until then had been "relegated to religion departments, theological seminaries, and a few Catholic universities" (p. 928). It seems quite likely that people in those places would have read Anscombe, though, and if they were the ones who kept the theory alive then her work really might have done as much as anyone's in helping to revive it.

*I've been wondering how Geach could have wanted to propose to someone he apparently did not know at all well. In an autobiographical essay he explains that he was '"in love with love" and determined to find someone to marry. So that more or less explains it:
“As my time at Oxford approached its end, I was in Augustine’s words ‘in love with love’: I desperately needed a girl to love and woo and marry. This is a dangerous state of mind, which often leads to humiliation or heartbreak or worse: by God’s mercy I met Elizabeth Anscombe, whom I married in 1941. I find it quite impossible to say how much she and our children have meant to me; I have never got over being suddenly struck with amazement from time to time at my good fortune.”

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