On Monday last week, the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford hosted a centenary symposium to remember the great Catholic philosopher after whom it was named: Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (March 19, 1919 – January 5, 2001).
Elizabeth Anscombe converted to Catholicism as a result of her own reading as a teenager, though it was not until she was an undergraduate at Oxford that she was instructed by a Dominican friar and formally received into the Church. As a Catholic and as a woman (women had only been admitted as full members of the university in 1920), Anscombe was viewed by many in Oxford with a double suspicion. However, this only reinforced her fiercely independent cast of mind.
