Michael Wee

Last month I was in Paris for a conference on the philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, where I spoke on Anscombe’s account of connatural knowledge and its importance for understanding her approach to moral philosophy, and in particular her famous (or notorious) injunction in favour of ‘banishing ethics totally from our minds’ (emphasis Anscombe’s) found in her essay ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The conference was organised by the Jesuit university college of Paris, the Facultés Loyola Paris, and brought together a range of people from the English-speaking and French-speaking worlds of Anscombe and Wittgenstein scholarship.

Before the conference, I took the opportunity to visit the Librarie philosophique Vrin, an entire bookshop dedicated to philosophy in the Latin Quarter of Paris, close to the Sorbonne. I was pleased to see a small but conspicuous section dedicated to Anscombe in the history of philosophy corner of the bookshop–not bad for a country where the analytic tradition is far from mainstream (how analytic Anscombe can be considered is a question for another day). It was a particular delight to see my friend Blandine Lagrut’s new monograph, Elizabeth Anscombe: Une philosophy de l’integrité, for sale. I have acquired a copy and look forward to reading it.

My other philosophical pilgrimage was to visit the resting place of Blaise Pascal in the Church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. Pascal’s Pensées continue to shape my thinking on the limits of reason and the importance of perception or vision in the moral life, so it was privilege to be able to pay my respects at his grave. Well, to be more precise, there is a pillar in a side chapel which indicates that his body was buried somewhere close by.