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So this is obviously a talk about Anscom.

But of course, you can't ever just give a talk about Anscombe

because Anscombe, like all the rest of us,

have been influenced by various people.

And if you really want to understand someone,

you have to understand their influences.

And those of you who know something about Anscombe may know that there were really two philosophers

who had an outsized influence on Anscombe.

One of these was Thomas Aquinas, the other was Wittgenstein.

And this is of course a lecture for the Termistic Institute, and so we're really going to be focusing here on

the Wittgensteinian influences on the thought of Anscom.

That's only sort of a joke, right? It's a joke in this sense. In fact, Anscom's conclusions about ethics really are

Thomistic in character, or at least toomistic in flavor. She's going to agree with Aquinas about an awful lot about what it is that we can and cannot do. But the way she gets there is going to be a much more Wittgensteinian way, at least in this respect, that when you read Aquinas, you kind of know what his conclusions are and what he's doing. But when you read Anscom, it's often rather difficult to figure that out. And the reason is because you approach a text of Anscom with the assumption that she's going to answer your question. And so you read her and you're like, I mean, I think I can answer the question, but I don't really get it. And you won't understand what's going on until you realize that when you read Anscom, much like when you reading Wittgenstein, the goal is not always to answer your question, but sometimes to get you to realize you were asking the wrong question, that your question was in some very deep way confused. And this characterizes an awful lot of Anscom's work. I have a list here of questions that cross-her works in metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, etc. You won't understand what she's trying to do until you realize that while everyone else thought these were the questions we were trying to answer,

she was trying to say, stop asking this question.

It has led you astray.

What do you have to add to an action to make that act intentional?

Normally I would sort of, you know, digress here for a minute, but you all have John Trinkler here in your philosophy program, and he would be much more articulate about exactly why Anscom wants to reject that question than I would be. What is the word I refer to? This is another one I meant togresson because I don't understand Anscom's paper the first person. It is very confusing. Why do I persist with the same person across my whole human life?

Again, I'll lead that one if you want to know more to John Swankler.

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