March 18, 1919

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (March 18, 1919 to January 5, 2001), according to a post in the OUP blog:

'...had a close relationship with her mentor, Ludwig Wittgenstein. She would end up translating many of his books and papers, including Philosophical Investigations. Much of his influence can be seen in her writings, including her seminal monograph, Intention. Anscombe was a formidable debater and engaged with long discussions with students and faculty members while a professor at the University of Cambridge. She is also known for her high profiled debate with C.S Lewis, which resulted in Lewis re-writing parts of his book, Miracles.

'Anscombe was a social activist, much of this guided by her Catholic religious beliefs. She opposed Britain’s entering World War II and the deployment of the atomic bomb because of the amount of civilian deaths it caused. She was staunchly against abortions and attended various sit-in protests.'

Anscombe describes, in one of her essays (collected in The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, 2016) how what :

'the cat thinks is the same as what you think. Now, this appearance, I want to say, is wrong. What the cat thinks is, in a decisive sense, not what you think. The appearance to the contrary is due to the fact that we have to render the feline thought by verbalizing a human variant of it: we put it in words in the words of human language. You can of course join the cat in crawling and prying in front of the cupboard.'

Such settings are glossed elsewhere, as in the words of Martin Gustaffson:

'According to Elizabeth Anscombe, having a language belongs to the nature of a human being, in a similar sort of way as having sight belongs to the nature of a cat. Plausibly, however, she would be aware that the notion of 'having a language' does not have the sort of determinacy that characterizes a notion such as a cat's being sighted. For a language is embedded in wider and dynamic patterns of human life – habits, institutions, traditions, ways of living together with others ...'

If one may be trivial, it is possible to say that Anscombe put the feline in Wittgenstein.