Bernard Quaritch Ltd.

ANSCOMBE, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret. Intention. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1957.

8vo, pp. ix, [1] blank, [1] introduction, [1] blank, 93, [1] blank; with the inscription ‘with good wishes / Elizabeth Anscombe’ to the verso of the front free endpaper; a nice clean copy, in the original printed wrappers, three small marks to the front cover, slightly soiled and chipped at extremities, split along upper joint repaired.

First edition. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, subsequently, one of his literary executors. ‘[She] had been an undergraduate at St Hugh’s, Oxford, and had come to Cambridge as a postgraduate student in 1942, when she began attending Wittgenstein’s lectures. When Wittgenstein resumed lecturing in 1944, she was one of his most enthusiastic students … In 1946–7 she was again in Oxford, having taken up a research fellowship at Somerville College, but she continued to go to Cambridge once a week to attend tutorials with Wittgenstein … By the end of the year she had become one of Wittgenstein’s closest friends and one of his most trusted students, an exception to his general dislike of academic women and especially of female philosophers. She became, in fact, an honorary male, addressed by him affectionately as “old man”’ (Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: the duty of genius (Vintage, 1991), p. 497f). Anscombe continued to be one of Wittgenstein’s intimate friends, and was present at the philosopher’s death.

Anscombe’s philosophical psychology, as expressed in the present work, ‘is distinguished by its concern with a set of problems which closely relate to conventional moral judgements – although Anscombe sets out to investigate them for their own sake, in a manner divorced from any moralistic concern. Philosophers have ordinarily presumed that those actions we mark off as “intentional” are preceded by, or incorporate, a special kind of internal act – “the intention to act in that way”. Anscombe, in contrast, takes it to be the distinguishing feature of an intentional act that the question “Why?”, asked in relation to it, can be a request for a reason, not for a cause. Intentional acts, that is, are defined not in terms of psychological processes which precede them but in terms of the sort of question which “has application” to them’ (John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 513f).

£400

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