She was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Anscombe was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and became an authority on his work and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations.

[7] Anscombe attended Sydenham High School and then, in 1937, went on to read literae humaniores ('Greats') at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

She was awarded a Second Class in her honour moderations in 1939 and (albeit it with reservations on the part of her Ancient History examiners[8]) a First in her degree finals in 1941.

[7] After graduating from Oxford, Anscombe was awarded a research fellowship for postgraduate study at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1942 to 1945.

She became an enthusiastic student, feeling that Wittgenstein's therapeutic method helped to free her from philosophical difficulties in ways that her training in traditional systematic philosophy could not.

It was only in Wittgenstein's classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought "I have got this, and I define 'yellow' (say) as this" being effectively attacked.After her fellowship at Cambridge ended, she was awarded a research fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford,[7] but during the academic year of 1946/47, she continued to travel to Cambridge once a week to attend tutorials with Wittgenstein that were devoted mainly to the philosophy of religion.

[10][11] Wittgenstein affectionately addressed her by the pet name "old man" – she being (according to Ray Monk) "an exception to his general dislike of academic women".

[10][11] His confidence in Anscombe's understanding of his perspective is shown by his choice of her as the translator of his Philosophical Investigations (for which purpose he arranged for her to spend some time in Vienna to improve her German[12][6]).

Wittgenstein appointed Anscombe as one of his three literary executors and so she played a major role in translating and spreading his works.

[15] And, in 1956, while a research fellow, she unsuccessfully protested against Oxford granting an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, whom she denounced as a mass murderer for his use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[16][17][18] She would further publicise her position in a (sometimes erroneously dated[19]) pamphlet privately printed soon after Truman's nomination for the degree was approved.

[17][21] Having remained at Somerville College since 1946, Anscombe was elected Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 1970, where she served until her retirement in 1986.

[7] On 5 January 2001, she died from kidney failure at Addenbrooke's Hospital at the age of 81, with her husband and four of their seven children at her bedside, just after praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary.

[24] Anscombe was buried adjacent to Wittgenstein in the St Giles' graveyard, Huntingdon Road, (now the Ascension Parish burial ground).

In 1948, she presented a paper at a meeting of Oxford's Socratic Club in which she disputed C. S. Lewis's argument that naturalism was self-refuting (found in the third chapter of the original publication of his book Miracles).

The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much.

This brought to the fore the importance of Gottlob Frege for Wittgenstein's thought and, partly on that basis, attacked "positivist" interpretations of the work.

She went on to edit or co-edit several volumes of selections from his notebooks, (co-)translating many important works like Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) and Wittgenstein's "sustained treatment" of G. E. Moore's epistemology, On Certainty (1969).

Three volumes of collected papers were published in 1981: From Parmenides to Wittgenstein; Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind; and Ethics, Religion and Politics.

It is clear though that it is the second that is crucial to her main purpose, which is to comprehend the way in which human thought and understanding and conceptualisation relate to the "events in a man's history", or the goings on to which he is subject.

Few people accept the conclusion – though the position was later adopted in a more radical form by David Lewis – but the paper was an important contribution to work on indexicals and self-consciousness that has been carried on by philosophers as varied as John Perry, Peter Strawson, David Kaplan, Gareth Evans, John McDowell, and Sebastian Rödl.

In proposing her first answer, that by "learning to speak, we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts", Anscombe thinks that by learning to speak we already have a linguistic representation of certain causal concepts and she gives an example of transitive verbs, such as scrape, push, carry, knock over.Example: I knocked over a vase of flowers.In proposing her second answer, that by observing some actions we can see causation, Anscombe thinks that we cannot ignore the fact that certain actions, which produced a certain event are possible to observe.Example: a cat spilled milk.The second idea that Anscombe defends in the article "Causality and Determination"[47] is that causation requires neither a necessary connection nor a universal generalization linking cause and effect.