FIRST THINGS
By: Jennifer A. Frey
In the mid-1980s, the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe drew up a syllabus of errors, which she delivered—rather appropriately—in Rome, to a group of moral theologians. Her syllabus consisted of twenty theses, commonly held by her fellow analytic philosophers, that she deemed “inimical to the Christian religion” and that could, she insisted, be shown “false on purely philosophical grounds.” They include:
—We are not members of a species, but “selves.”
—There are no absolute moral prohibitions.
