...at the London Review of Books. (You may need to create a free account to read this.) Philosophically informative, as one would expect, the review also includes some interesting personal recollections by Nagel:
As an undergraduate at Cornell, I had been a student of Norman Malcolm – like Anscombe a student and close friend of Wittgenstein – and when I went to Oxford as a graduate student in 1958, it was with an introduction from him to Anscombe. I knew her as the translator of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as the author of the pathbreaking monograph Intention, and as the unsuccessful opponent of Truman’s degree. I spent many hours discussing philosophy in her chaotic house in St John Street, full of children and smoke (at the time one could buy cigarettes in boxes of a hundred, and there was always such a box next to her). She had a beautiful, ethereal voice and a beautiful face with one lazy eye, and her body was hidden in shapeless steerage clothes.
Anscombe was intimidating not just because of her powerful intelligence, which was always at full throttle, but because of her strongly moralistic attitude to practically everything – a trait I associate with students of Wittgenstein. When this is part of the intellectual atmosphere, it generates useless anxiety, and I always suspected she disapproved of me, though she was very generous. My adviser was J.L. Austin, and I spent enough time with members of the male philosophical establishment to pick up on their distaste for Anscombe; she returned it in full, defiant in her lack of gentility.
Foot was completely different: slim, handsome, unobtrusively well turned out, refined in speech and manner, effortlessly self-possessed. I attended the classes in which she presented her objections to Hare, and was invited with other students for discussion at her home. Her teaching made a strong impression on me, but in 1959 her husband left her, ostensibly because she couldn’t have children, and she withdrew in misery from the public scene. She ended up teaching in the US, where I saw her often. She was witty. To an American friend who asked, ‘Philippa, how can one tell the difference between an upper-class and a lower-class British accent?’ she replied: ‘My dear, any accent is lower-class.’ And in a backhanded tribute to Hare’s intellectual agility, she said: ‘Of course he’s up the wrong tree, but it’s wonderful to watch him swinging from branch to branch.’
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