| Summary: | Elizabeth Anscombe's philosophy of mind, in contradistinction to her philosophy of action, has received relatively little critical attention. Moreover, commentators disagree sharply about how to classify it. Anscombe has been described as 'a thoroughgoing behaviourist' (David Velleman), a would-be materialist (Sebastian Rodl) and a 'crypto-dualist' (Daniel Dennett). The notorious difficulty of her writing partly explains this remarkable disagreement, but a deeper reason for it is that her philosophy of mind resists classification in standard terms. She is in substantial sympathy with a non-metaphysical, Wittgensteinian approach to questions in philosophy of mind. This approach refrains from advancing 'theses' about the mind and its relation to the body and instead assembles reminders about the grammar of our talk about minds, with a view to exposing the latent nonsense in the theses about the mind advanced by non-Wittgensteinian philosophers.
On the other hand, throughout Anscombe's philosophical career, particularly in its later phases, there are scattered indications of sympathy with Aristotelian philosophy of mind, according to which sensation and thought involve the reception in the percipient or thinker of the 'forms' of things sensed or thought of. Although some philosophers, such as Anthony Kenny, regard Wittgensteinism and Aristotelianism as natural allies, Wittgenstein would certainly reject the controversial metaphysical commitments underlying Aristotelian philosophy of mind (most obviously, hylomorphic ontology).
My dissertation defends an Aristotelian (specifically Thomist) position in philosophy of mind against the Wittgensteinian objections that Anscombe was inclined to regard as fatal to any metaphysics of mind, whether physicalist or dualist, while also highlighting and developing Anscombe's own stray indications of sympathy with Aristotelianism in philosophy of mind. It also highlights the severe tension between Anscombe's Wittgensteinian sympathies and her staunch Catholicism.
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