“Truth that one produces” or the history of philosophy by Elizabeth Anscombe

Abstract

The article deals with the specifics of Elizabeth Anscombe’s approach to the history of philosophy. First, the author presents various approaches to the history of philosophy, and then gives a brief introduction of Anscombe as a philosopher and as a historian of philos­ophy. Her articles “Causality and Determinism” and “Practical Truth” are discussed as paradigmatic examples of Anscombe’s works on the history of philosophy. These exam­ples show that Anscombe’s appeal to the philosophy of the past, and especially to the legacy of Aristotle, was not episodic. The reason for her turning to the history of phi­losophy were always caused by theoretical difficulties in the contemporary philosophical context. For instance, the article “Causality and Determinism” appeals to a wide range of sources (Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Mill) in order to show the history of the forma­tion of the concept of causality as a necessary connection of events, but Anscombe looks for a solution to the problem in the works of her older contemporary B. Russell. Espe­cially often, Anscombe turns to Aristotle’s practical philosophy, with the help of which she attacks contemporary concepts. In particular, she criticizes the concept of “moral obligation”, points at an incorrect understanding of the “practical syllogism”, reveals the shortcomings of the Anglo-American concept of desire. In the end, the author of the article offers a brief retelling of the analysis of the Aristotelian concept of “practical truth”, which Anscombe proposes to understand as “the truth that one produces in acting according to choice and decision”. In proposing such an interpretation, Anscombe relies less on a philological or contextual analysis, but rather is guided by her own intuitions.