Tuesday, January 11, 2011
G.E. M. Anscombe (!!!) in the NYT
MOJ-ers might be interested in this interesting profile, which appeared in a recent issue of the NYT, of G.E.M. Anscombe and her work. I'm not an expert, of course, by my sense is that the author, Mark Oppenheimer, did a nice job with the piece (though, one friend noted that this description of action theory -- "a sub-field concerned with how our brains cause our bodies to do things" -- might be a bit off.)
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/01/ge-m-anscombe-in-the-nyt.html
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Your frined was quite right that Miss Anscombe would have foundd te description of action theory as "a sub-field concerned with how our brains cause our bodies to do things" "a bit off."
She was a relentless critic of Descartes's Mind/Body dualism, in all its forms and the brain/body distinction is one of them. Anscombe's initial arguments follow Wittgenstein's closely. "Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking" (1953). She also remarks, although "the concept of 'thought' is one that we all possess, it is difficult to give a satisfactory account of it and no one as yet has, although not for lack of trying."
For her, one of the things that distinguishes intentioal action, is non-observational knowledge: we know what we are doing intentionally, without watching ourselves doing it - just as we know the position of our limbs without looking.
Miss Anscombe was my tutor in 1965/6