The deaths within the space of two weeks of the American philosopher, WV Quine, and the English one, Elizabeth Anscombe, were somehow fitting. These were the two leading figures of two rival schools. Quine was perhaps the greatest heir to the tradition of Russell and the Vienna Circle and probably the leading American philosopher of the 20th century. Anscombe was one of the most important of the many philosophers who followed the later Wittgenstein, and arguably the greatest woman philosopher of our times. Strong characters both, they were unalike in almost everything.
Quine, born in 1908, seems to have been, with AJ Ayer, the only Anglophone philosopher invited in the early 1930s to attend meetings of the Vienna Circle, and in many ways he stuck loyally to its scientific worldview for the rest of his life. To the end he remained something like a materialist and a behaviourist, a denier of objectively existing values, of God, freedom of the will and "mind"-although towards the end of his life, in one of the witty little essays that make up his philosophical dictionary Quiddities, he did confess that "consciousness is to me a mystery." Indeed Quine went even further than Russell in paring down ontological commitments. He preferred desert landscapes to verdant jungles.
At the same time, however, Quine departed from the old dogmas of empiricism in surprising ways. Empiricists, like his heroes Russell and Carnap, sought to identify certain propositions, such as the statements of maths and logic or the deliveries of sense data, which were certain. In this way they hoped to vanquish scepticism (Russell) or offer a means of distinguishing between science on the one hand, and pseudo-science, metaphysics and religion on the other (Carnap). Quine, however, argued that certainty was unachieveable. Our beliefs do not face the test of experience one by one, but holistically as "a corporate body." This means that any propositions, even those in maths and logic of which we feel most certain, might need to be abandoned in the light of experience. It is not that we have no grounds for believing some statements true and others false. But the proper grounds are those that real-life scientists employ, like explanatory power and simplicity rather than a "one to one" fit between proposition and experience.
Anscombe's thought can be understood, in large part, as a sustained quarrel with this scientistic view. Born 11 years after Quine, she became an admirer and friend of Wittgenstein, translating his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, into English. She shared Wittgenstein's religious leanings-indeed, she had converted to Catholicism as a teenager-and like him, she believed that philosophy had gone wrong in disregarding the peculiar and varied logic of everyday language. But Anscombe was very much her own woman and developed her own distinctive arguments and positions. Her most important book, Intention, an extremely suggestive and influential monograph of 1957, more or less founded the modern philosophy of action. Where empiricists believed that all knowledge was founded on observation, Anscombe argued that this was not true of our own intentions-for example, I know I am writing this article, without observing myself doing so. In fact, she maintained that between someone observing and someone acting, there is what she called "a difference of fit"; in the case of action, the mind does not respond to the world, it attempts to shape it.
More generally, Anscombe believed that modern scientistic philosophy of the type associated with Russell, Carnap or Quine worked with a hollowed-out view of humanity-in treating human action as just a species of event, it dehumanised it. This way of conceiving of human agency, moreover, was connected in her mind with a crude "consequentialism" of much modern moral philosophy-it was Anscombe herself who coined that widely used term. Modern moral philosophers were much more interested in the promotion of their favourite ends-happiness, say, or utility-than they were in the means by which ends were brought about. This "consequentialist" way of thinking was, for Anscombe, epitomised in the decision to drop atomic bombs on the innocent civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if the killing of innocent people could be easily justified by some greater good.
Nor did the dissimilarities between Quine and Anscombe stop at the level of doctrines. Their styles and values were worlds apart. Quine wrote a prose of wonderful elegance-cool, lucid and jaunty, it was the perfect vehicle for his thought. Anscombe's translation of Wittgenstein's Investigations, is a classic in its own right, capturing the intense yet informal quality of Wittgenstein's German. Her own writing is similarly sharp but conversational in style, as befits her belief that science was a bad model for philosophy-that it had to be done in a way which was closer to the stream of life.
Quine was, like another of his heroes, David Hume, a moderate, sceptical conservative: "the constraint imposed by social tradition" he once wrote, "is the gyroscope that helps to keep the ship of state on an even keel." He seems to have thought that the American students who protested against the Vietnam war were guilty of something like treachery. Indeed there might even be some connection between scepticism about foundationalism in science and his scepticism of utopianism in politics. Quine, however, was never tempted to become a public moralist-it followed from his view of philosophy, that the philosopher could speak with no special authority on moral or political matters. Anscombe, by contrast, was a dogmatic Catholic, dismaying liberals by her public opposition to both contraception and homosexuality, and conservatives by her campaign to deny Harry Truman, the man she held responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an honorary Oxford degree. Quine was generally tactful, retrained and meticulous-sometimes to the point of pedantry. His autobiography gave little evidence of an inner life, although it did record in scrupulous detail all the countries its author had visited. Anscombe, however, was loud and outspoken. She once reprimanded Ayer, "You would not be thought so clever if you did not speak so fast," to which Ayer replied, "You would not be thought so profound if you did not speak so slowly." She liked to wear slacks rather than skirts, often with a tunic; when told by a maître d' at a stuffy Boston restaurant that they did not allow women in trousers, she simply took hers off.
Yet for all of their differences, historians might well be struck by the things that unite, rather than divide, these two thinkers. For they produced their ideas at a time of intense international ferment. Frege, Russell, the logical positivists and Wittgenstein had given philosophy new doctrines and, above, all, a burning sense of importance. There was nothing parochial about the philosophy of this period; incorporating as it did philosophers from Britain, Austria, Germany, Poland, the US and elsewhere into a network of debates, it was remarkably cosmopolitan. In fact it was much more cosmopolitan than most philosophy is today-analytic philosophy at least is very largely an English-language affair. But the arguments of this time were focused. This meant that Quine's and Anscombe's thought had a common frame of reference; their intellectual development can be told as part of a single story. It seems unlikely that historians will find it so easy to tell a similar story about the development of philosophy in the period after them-even English-language philosophy.
Maybe there is something else that unites them as well. The work of Quine and Anscombe, Quine especially, is beyond the ken of all but the dedicated specialist. They are not the first philosophers of whom this is true. Most of the great German metaphysicians make for hard reading. The 19th- century American logician, CS Peirce, to take an English-language example, is sometimes close to impenetrable. What is perhaps different in the present case is that Quine and Anscombe were both clear and gifted writers-it was their arguments rather than their prose that was difficult. A salutary development-and a sad one. n
