James Doyle, "No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism" (Harvard UP, 2018)
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What is the historical significance of G.E.M. Anscombe and why is her centennial being celebrated?
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with James Doyle, lecturer in philosophy. at Harvard University. His new book, No Morality, No Self, Anscomb's Radical Skepticism. is just out from Harvard University Press. This is the centennial year of the birth of GEM Anscombe, one of the major philosophical figures of the twentieth century within the analytic tradition.
A close associate of Wittgenstein, Anscomb contributed fundamental insights in philosophy of mind, action theory, and ethics. In his new book, Doyle considers two of her major papers. In modern moral philosophy, she denies that the term moral picks out a special type of obligation or reason, and argues for reorienting ethics towards understanding concepts of virtue. In the first person, she denies that the term I really is the device of self reference that it seems to be. Doyle clarifies and assesses her arguments in response to a number of prominent critics, and in doing so, he shows how Anscomb continues to inspire thinking about fundamental issues in ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.
Let's turn to the interview. Uh hello, James Doyle. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi. Very happy to be here.
So I'm really interested in talking about your book on uh GEM Anscombe, uh, No Morality, No Self. It's an interesting, you know, it's a different book in that it focuses on two of her papers and, you know, sort of defends it defends and clarifies her arguments, um, uh, responds to certain critics and so forth. So it's it's it's um it's a interestingly uh structured uh sort of book, um uh somewhat different from what we usually do. But before we we get into the the articles that you focus on, uh it'd be good if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, um and your your background as a philosopher and then how you came to write this book.
My original uh philosophical interests as a PhD student were actually in uh in political philosophy. Um but then s soon after graduating my interests began to shift uh and they've uh shifted quite a lot sort of subsequently also. But I became interested more in in ethics and the history of ethics and and ancient philosophy and I I sort of had realized that that it sort of turned out that a lot of the philosophers I particularly admired had a background in in Greek philosophy. Uh and I sort of developed a kind of paranoia that that they were sort of onto something that I d didn't know about. So I uh I sort of trained myself up in in ancient philosophy. Uh and Partly as a result of coming to understand, as I thought, Anscombe's nineteen fifty eight paper, Modern Moral Philosophy, better.
uh I I started to become more interested in issues in um moral psychology and the philosophy of action. That's to say Taking seriously uh her suggestion that there were questions in those areas of philosophy that needed to be dealt with more satisfactorily before we could even sort of move on to ethics at all. In any case, I've I've been sort of continuously interested in Anskom's work and e especially modern moral philosophy, which I first read Uh as an undergraduate, I mentioned the book, I was completely bewildered. Um, but also weirdly kind of fascinated when I first read that as an undergraduate. And the way I came to write the book was, well, It began as as two separate articles on those two papers, um, which then grew in size and became too unwieldy to to work as articles.
And A further factor was that I was I was working on them sort of more intensively, actually as a way of procrastinating um what was kind of officially my main project, which I've been working on now for about fifteen years, uh, which was a book on Plato's Gorgias, uh, which is still unfinished, but I feel like, you know, at least I've got this book out of it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the historical significance of G.E.M. Anscombe and why is her centennial being celebrated?
0:07–6:42
2
How did James Doyle’s own philosophical background lead him to write *No Morality, No Self*?
6:42–14:41
3
What were the main arguments Anscombe made in her 1958 paper “Modern Moral Philosophy”?
14:41–22:32
4
Why does Anscombe claim that the term “moral” is senseless and how does this relate to the rise of consequentialism?
22:32–28:54
5
What is the central skeptical claim of Anscombe’s 1975 paper “The First Person” about the pronoun I?
28:54–37:26
6
How does Doyle assess contemporary criticisms of Anscombe’s view on morality and the self?
37:26–46:48
7
What is the “circularity argument” that Anscombe raises against treating I as a referring expression?
46:48–54:47
8
What future projects is James Doyle pursuing after this book and how do they build on Anscombe’s legacy?
54:47–1:03:02
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