The collected philosophical papers by the British analytic philosopher Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001), best-known as a favourite student and literary executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also an immensely important philosopher in her own right.
The first volume ‘contained essays on Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Hume, Brentano, Frank Ramsey, Wittgenstein, and two highly interesting papers on Parmenides. The second volume, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, began with an introduction wherein Anscombe described how at the age of twelve she first became interested in philosophy. Her influential Cambridge inaugural lecture, ‘Causality and determination’ (1971), was reprinted in this volume; so too was her earliest philosophical publication, ‘A reply to Mr [C. S.] Lewis’ (1947). The topics of the third volume, Ethics, Religion and Politics included the morality or otherwise of contraception, the source of the authority of the state, the character of modern moral philosophy, the nature of faith, the meaning of transubstantiation, and the differences between just and unjust wars’ (ODNB).
