G. E. M. Anscombe was a wide-ranging analytic philosopher of the first rank, a close student and translator of major works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a Roman Catholic social activist and apologist. She was known for her keen and penetrating interrogations of that which is taken for granted by many other philosophers; according to John M. Dolan, A. J. Ayer once said that she was the only philosopher he could think of who had made truly original contributions to philosophy on the basis of reflections on Wittgenstein, and W. V. O. Quine of Harvard University expressed the opinion that Anscombe's extraordinary book Intention (1957) was no less than the single most important philosophical work on the concept of action since Aristotle. She is widely credited with founding the discipline of analytic philosophy of action with Intention; with coining the now familiar expression consequentialism in ethics; and with moving contemporary moral philosophy toward revisiting Aristotle and the tradition of inquiry into the virtues.
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