Anscombe’s First Lectures at Oxford

Editor’s note: This essay was adapted from a lecture given in May 2026 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Elizabeth Anscombe was an incredibly wide-ranging philosopher, and in the early years of her career she had no interest per se in ethical questions. Her dissertation was on the relationship between the soul and the body, and Anscombe’s first set of lectures were on epistemology.

We do not have Anscombe’s complete set of lectures from the Fall of 1948. Furthermore, Anscombe never dates any of her lectures or pages, and sometimes does not clearly differentiate one lecture from another. While some lectures are clearly written out from end to end, there are various pages that may be the outline of a lecture, or simply some notes for one of the lectures. It is possible that after Anscombe began by writing out a significant number of lectures, she gradually shifted to following the approach of her teacher Wittgenstein, who almost always lectured without notes.

Now, Wittgenstein did a lot of thinking and preparing for what he would lecture on, but chose to do it without notes, and also to relatively quickly engage students into the discussion of the class. It is possible that at some point in the term, Anscombe began to follow Wittgenstein’s approach, and lecture not from a script. But this is speculation on my part, although not without some basis.

Anscombe’s Life in the Fall of 1948

Anscombe had developed an intense friendship with Wittgenstein between 1944 and1947, but in the summer of 1947, Wittgenstein resigned to work on his book in Ireland and Anscombe did not see him much between the Fall of 1947 and the Fall of 1948. Wittgenstein did visit Anscombe in Cambridge in the first weeks of October 1948, just before she returned to Oxford to begin her lectures.

A lot was going on with Anscombe as she prepared her first set of lectures in the Fall of 1948. First, Anscombe was apparently known not to like lecturing. It seems she had some kind of fear or phobia about lecturing. This was known around the university by 1951, as some eminent philosophers suggested Anscombe for speaking on the BBC, but figured she would not do it because of her dislike of public speaking. It is also possible that like Wittgenstein, Anscombe preferred that philosophy go on as a conversation. In my recent book, Anscombe on Wittgenstein: Reminiscences of a Philosophical Friendship, we reproduce Anscombe’s notes from tutorials she had with Wittgenstein.

It is worth noting that these tutorials Anscombe had with Wittgenstein did not follow the model of tutorials as they were typically conducted in Oxford and Cambridge at the time. A typical Oxbridge tutorial consisted of a student preparing and then reading a short paper to begin the tutorial, and then the tutor commenting on it and explaining various things to the student. In this model, the tutor was very much in charge. Students did not ask questions of their tutors in such tutorials; they answered their tutors’ questions. It would have been considered cheeky to ask one’s tutor questions in a tutorial.

But as we can see from Anscombe’s notes on her tutorials with Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein totally ignored this standard model of tutorials, opting instead to conduct a dialogue with Anscombe and Wasfi Hijab, the other student in the tutorial. In this, Wittgenstein was following Plato’s model for how to do philosophy, conducting a dialogue with the students. We see Wittgenstein taking up the dialogue model of how to engage in philosophy not only in his tutorials with Anscombe, but also in Wittgenstein’s masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations themselves, much of which goes on as a dialogue between Wittgenstein and an unnamed interlocutor.

Second, in the fall of 1948, Anscombe had some other pressing academic deadlines. She was trying to finish up what would be her first published academic article, which had to be sent off to Max Black at Cornell, to be published in a collection of essays on analytic philosophy. Anscombe also was finishing up a translation of a collection of Descartes’ philosophical writings, which were due to the editor that fall.

Third, Anscombe was at that time trying to overcome her addiction to cigarettes. She was getting hypnotized and possibly going to a psychiatrist, and that was one of the sources of Anscombe’s difficulties at the time.

Fourth, Anscombe was troubled by criticism of her various unconventional choices. One which was a perpetual source of conflict was her decision to keep her own name after marriage, which in British culture at that time was extremely rare. Anscombe also bucked convention at the time by preferring to wear trousers, and since women dons were required to lecture in gowns and sub-fusc, which for women required wearing a skirt. Anscombe was almost prevented from delivering her first set of lectures by a university official at the lecture hall, who refused to allow her into the lecture hall without being dressed properly.

Fifth, Anscombe was emotionally involved with Iris Murdoch, who was completely infatuated with Anscombe at that time. Anscombe meanwhile was away from her family in Oxford, undoubtedly lonely and probably somewhat miserable, and there is no doubt that Murdoch was extremely attractive to almost everyone who interacted with her. Anscombe never got sexually involved with Murdoch, but the evident intensity of their friendship at the time was also troubling Anscombe.

So as Anscombe is preparing and giving these lectures, there is a lot going on.

Anticipation for Anscombe’s Lectures

Before Anscombe gave her first set of lectures, she had already developed a reputation as a brilliant and original mind. She was tough and could be abrasive, but other philosophers were always wanting to hear her. Gilbert Ryle’s comment in a letter to the head of Somerville in 1948 noted that although he did not know Anscombe personally, Anscombe’s comments when she attended the lectures of other dons, or participated in the philosophical clubs around Oxford, were such that when someone heard that Anscombe had been present, always asked “what did Anscombe say?”

Anscombe’s first set of lectures in the Fall of 1948 was the first extended public opportunity for her to present her philosophical “chops” to the University Community. And Oxford was eager to hear what Anscombe had to say: a university official notes that 120 people showed up for Anscombe’s first lecture in October of 1948. Among those at the lecture were her friends Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch.

In the Fall of 1948 Anscombe was scheduled to give sixteen one-hour lectures. However, in terms of what can be made sense of from the lectures in the archives, there are no more than ten or eleven lectures to be found there. Since there are no dates on the manuscript, nor is there any formal indication of when one lecture ends and another begins, one has to base the division of the lectures on a) internal clues (e. g. “I am continuing the discussion I began on Tuesday”) and b) in terms of the amount of ground Anscombe could be reasonably expected to cover in the course of a fifty-minute lecture.

Could Anscombe have taken out some lectures for use elsewhere or at another time? In terms of Anscombe’s lectures over her time at Oxford, it seems she only gave her lectures on this topic once; so I think it is likely that she did not reuse them, though it is possible she might have a few years later when she gave a set of lectures entitled “Topics in Plato.”

General Approach to Philosophy in the Lectures

Anscombe’s starting point for these lectures on epistemology, that is, how we can know things, was to present the opening passages of Plato’s Theaetetus. Anscombe began with Plato because she found him exemplary in terms of the importance of the questions that Plato raised, and how such questions spurred on further thought in readers of Plato’s dialogues. Furthermore, Anscombe considered Plato’s dialogue format to be exemplary in how it revealed some questions in themselves to be either problematic or even impossible to answer coherently. So, in summary, Anscombe was employing Plato not to provide answers to the big questions in epistemology, but to provide the seeds of the key questions.

Although Anscombe was fluent in Greek, and although this would also have been true of many of the students at the lectures, Anscombe insisted that the lectures would be entirely in English and require no knowledge of Greek.   Anscombe insisted on this, because she wanted to introduce as wide a variety of students as possible to the philosophical questions raised in Plato’s Theaetetus.

Anscombe was aware that very few people read the Theaetetus, but almost all of the students reading philosophy were reading Descartes and Hume, and Anscombe was convinced that the questions that Plato raised were the right questions, and challenged the adequacy of Cartesian and Humean treatments of epistemological questions.

Anscombe was also aware that the Theaetetus does not generally provide the answers to the questions it asks, and certainly does not present a positive theory about knowledge.  Rather, in the Theaetetus Plato is trying to get those reading it to think through the questions themselves, and so Anscombe: true to her approach to philosophy, said she hoped that that her lectures would lead students to read the Theaetetus and discuss it with others.

Opening Lecture: On How to Do (and How Not to Do) Philosophy

In Anscombe’s first lecture, her first point is about how to do, and how not to do, philosophy. She draws on the opening passage from Plato’s Thaeatetus to make her point.

The initial thesis discussed in the Theaetetus is that knowledge is perception.  At the beginning of the dialogue Socrates attributes this view to a young man named Theaetetus with whom he is engaging in philosophical conversation. According to Socrates, Theaetetus is taking a Protagorean view of knowledge.   Protagorus was known for his famous saying “Man is the measure of all things.” Socrates takes up Theaetetus’s definition of knowledge, namely that knowledge is perception. For on this account, it would seem that what one perceives, being knowledge, must always be true.

Protagorus’s view, as Anscombe describes it, is that things never simply are, but always becoming. No one description can be true, since something may be heavy in one sense but light in another, or big in one sense and little in another, and so on. Protagorus was in part repeating the famous Hereclitean view that all things are in flux.

Socrates’s example of “things being in flux” is the fact that whereas at the beginning of the year Socrates was bigger than Theaetetus, since that time Theaetetus has grown and now is bigger than Socrates.

Anscombe acknowledges that Socrates’s appeal to a change in size is perhaps not the best example, since size is not typically relative.  A more difficult examples is  whether when two of us see a color we see the same color.

Like Socrates in the Theaetetus, Anscombe in her lecture takes a generally encouraging tone. Anscombe recognizes that the student’s willingness to raise questions and make claims, whether they are right or wrong, is the true starting point for doing philosophy. It is only by getting things wrong, and trying again and again, is one likely to progress.   What Anscombe says here in her first lecture mimics what Anscombe herself experienced as a teenager. As a teenager Anscombe rewrote a proof she was working on seven times, only to discover each time that she was making the same error, but had buried the error a little deeper each time.

In this first lecture Anscombe is doing two distinct but related things. First, she is doing philosophy as she understands it should be done. Second, pedagogically speaking, she is engaged in meta-philosophy, that is, reflecting on how philosophy should be done.

Problems with Starting with Epistemology

In her next lecture, Anscombe relates Socrates’s arguments in the Theaetetus to the epistemic turn in philosophy inaugurated by Descartes, in which one begins not with the traditional metaphysical questions about reality, but with epistemological questions: how one can know anything.

According to Anscombe, one problem with such approaches is that initially, they accept all such experiences as equal, and then evaluate them on a posteriori grounds, that is, coherence. Anscombe is here challenging the very possibility that subjective certainty could serve as a starting point for philosophy, i. e., that some kind of inner experience could provide self-justifying knowledge.

This raises further questions, such as the nature of the senses and of organs in sensation and perception, and also whether knowledge is always by direct perception, or is at times lodged independently of perception in memory.

The Third Lecture

In her next lecture, Anscombe continues her attack on the view that perception can provide the basis for meaning and truth, beginning the lecture with a quote from William James.  James was not on the philosophy curriculum at Oxford, so it highly likely that Anscombe was reading James on the recommendation of Wittgenstein. She quotes the following: “All propositions are believed through the mere fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions.”

Anscombe thought that James’s claim was clearly and obviously false. After all, as Anscombe noted, people conceive of many things they do not believe, like “a pink unicorn is walking down my street.” But it was not a naive claim. Rather, James’s claim was rooted in the deeper assumptions of Cartesian epistemology. That is, that knowledge begins with indubitable inner experience.

At this point, Anscombe returns to Protagorus’s relativism, i. e., that whatever seems to true to an individual is true for them, because it raises the logical problem of how there can be false belief. The problem is deeper than it first appears, because if “saying what is not” is saying “nothing,” the  issue is not merely the problem of believing falsely, but how false idea can even make sense.

Anscombe initially provides the Theaetetus’s response to Protagorus, by appealing to the future as an epistemological test. In her example, if you say “the food will taste sweet,” the question of the truth of that claim can only be answered when the future arrives. This challenge is decisive, as it is something that inner experience at a particular moment cannot supply.

At this point, Anscombe raised the underlying philosophical difficulty of meaning, and appeals to Wittgenstein’s private language argument to show the problem. That is, if every explanation presupposed internal access to meaning, then the meaning must already be present before the explanation.  Which leads to the private language problem, namely the idea that words can derive the meaning from inner, non-public reference, which is philosophically indefensible.

Learning from Wittgenstein

In the following lectures we get examples of how Anscombe’s critique of empiricist philosophy was based on lessons she was learning from Wittgenstein.  For example, Anscombe draws on one aspect of Wittgenstein’s private language argument: the problem of ostensive definition.

In her critique of the very idea that meaning is ever fully private or definable via a single act of ostension, Anscombe moves her audience towards the view that meaning is social, shared, and bound to practices and training.  In other words,  even logical constants derive their intelligibility from their role in use, not from internal referents or private acts of naming.

In another lecture, Anscombe seeks to make her point by writing “cat” on the blackboard. She can write it down, but only one of two persons in the audience might recognize it as the word “cat.” The other sees it as merely marks. So here again we see that knowledge cannot be reduced to perception, because even when appearances are identical, knowledge differs.  Here Anscombe’s example is derived from Wittgenstein’s example of the duck-rabbit, how a person never merely “sees” things, but also “sees as” something or other.

Influence of Wittgenstein in the Lectures

By the time Anscombe gave these lectures, she had had in her possession a manuscript copy of part of Wittgenstein’s still unpublished Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein had loaned to her for over a year. However, that was not Wittgenstein’s only later work which Anscombe could have been learning from.

One other unpublished work by Wittgenstein, known as the Blue Book, which Wittgenstein had had mimeographed and made available to his students in 1934, seems to have been in relatively wide circulation in Oxford. Being in fairly wide circulation by the late 1940s, the Blue Book was the work of Wittgenstein which Anscombe would have been able to discuss with others.

So the question arises: are the insights of Wittgenstein’s Blue Book sufficient as the source of Wittgensteinian insights in Anscombe’s first set of lectures?

From a close analysis of Anscombe’s lectures in relation to both Wittgenstein’s Blue Book and his Philosophical Investigations, I have discovered that in referencing Wittgenstein in her lectures, there are a number of arguments that she makes that are parallel to arguments Wittgenstein makes in the Blue Book: for example, Wittgenstein’s analysis of the limits of ostensive definition; Wittgenstein’s argument that meaning lies in use, not in reference; Wittgenstein’s rejection of the sense-data account of how one comes to know things, i.e. that one’s private cogitations cannot serve as the starting point for knowledge.

However, in Anscombe’s lectures we also find her drawing on Wittgensteinian arguments that are not found in the Blue Book, but are found in the Philosophical Investigations.

Is Anscombe Repeating Wittgenstein?

Despite Anscombe’s oft-repeated claim that she got everything she knew at this point from Wittgenstein, in these lectures Anscombe is not simply repeating Wittgenstein, but is in fact going beyond Wittgenstein in a number of ways.

To give just one example, Wittgenstein always resisted—or was simply incapable of—systematizing his thinking in terms of presenting a single master or linear argument. In contrast, in drawing on Wittgenstein’s insights, Anscombe in fact extracts and organizes a number of Wittgenstein’s insights into a structured argument.

Even at this earliest stage of Anscombe’s career, she was already drawing on and employing Wittgenstein’s arguments and insights for her own independent and extended arguments. This reveals that even at this early stage, we already see Anscombe’s originality, despite the profound and seemingly overwhelming influence of Wittgenstein on Anscombe at that time.

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