Peter Geach | |
|---|---|
 Geach in 1990 | |
| Born | Peter Thomas Geach (1916-03-29)29 March 1916 |
| Died | 21 December 2013(2013-12-21) (aged 97) Cambridge, England |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Spouse | [1] |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytical Thomism |
| Institutions | |
Main interests | |
Notable ideas | |
Peter Thomas Geach[a]FBA (29 March 1916 – 21 December 2013) was a British philosopher who was Professor ofLogic at theUniversity of Leeds. His areas of interest werephilosophical logic,ethics,history of philosophy,philosophy of religion and the theory ofidentity.
Peter Geach was born inChelsea,London, on 29 March 1916.[2] He was the only son of George Hender Geach and his wife Eleonora Frederyka Adolfinanée Sgonina.[3] His father, who was employed in theIndian Educational Service, would go on to work as a professor of philosophy inLahore and later as the principal of a teacher-training college inPeshawar.[4][5]
His parents' marriage was unhappy and quickly broke up.[6] Until the age of four, he lived with his maternal grandparents, who werePolish immigrants, inCardiff.[6] After this time he was placed in the care of a guardian (until his father returned to Britain) and contact with his mother and her parents ceased.[6] He attendedLlandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff and, later,Clifton College.[7]
His father, who had studied withBertrand Russell andG. E. Moore at Cambridge, taught him philosophy starting with logic.[8]
In 1934 Geach won a scholarship toBalliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 withfirst-class honours inliterae humaniores.[9][10] At Oxford, he increasingly engaged in intellectual clashes with Catholics, through which he discovered the Catholic faith, later converting to theRoman Catholic Church.[11] He later described it:
I was certainly cleverer than they, but they had the immeasurable advantage that they were right—an advantage that they did not throw away by resorting to the bad philosophy and apologetics then sometimes taught in Catholic schools. One day my defences quite suddenly collapsed: I knew that if I were to remain an honest man I must seek instruction in the Catholic Religion. I was received into the Catholic Church on May 31, 1938.[12]
Geach spent a year (1938–39)[9] as a Gladstone Research Student, based atSt Deiniol's Library, Hawarden.[13]
Geach refused to join the British Army in theSecond World War and, as aconscientious objector, was employed in the war years in timber production.[14] Though Geach himself recounts that he did later try, unsuccessfully, to join theFree Polish Army.[15]
Following the end of the war in 1945, he undertook further research atCambridge.
In 1951, Geach was appointed to his first substantive academic post, as assistant lecturer at theUniversity of Birmingham, going on to becomeReader in Logic. In 1966 Geach resigned in protest at the University’s decision to create an Institute of Contemporary Culture. In his resignation letter he said he had no wish to stay at a university which "preferred Pop Art to Logic".[16] In the same year he was appointed Professor of Logic in the Department ofPhilosophy at theUniversity of Leeds.[9][17] Geach retired from his Leeds chair in 1981 with the titleEmeritus Professor of Logic.[18]
At various times Geach heldvisiting professorships at the universities ofCornell,Chicago,Michigan,Pennsylvania, andWarsaw.[9]
His early work includes the classic textsMental Acts andReference and Generality, the latter defending an essentially modern conception ofreference against medieval theories of supposition. His Catholic perspective was integral to his philosophy. He was perhaps the founder ofanalytical Thomism (though the current of thought running through his andElizabeth Anscombe's work to the present day was only ostensibly so named forty years later byJohn Haldane), the aim of which is to synthesise Thomistic and analytic approaches. Geach was a student and an early follower ofLudwig Wittgenstein whilst at theUniversity of Cambridge.[19]
Geach defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentiallyrational animals, each one miraculously created. He dismissedDarwinistic attempts to regard reason as inessential to humanity, as "mere sophistry, laughable, or pitiable." He repudiated any capacity forlanguage in animals as mere "association of manual signs with things or performances."[20]
Geach dismissed both pragmatic and epistemic conceptions of truth, commending a version of thecorrespondence theory proposed byThomas Aquinas. He argues that there is one reality rooted in God himself, who is the ultimate truthmaker. God, according to Geach,is truth. While they lived, he sawW. V. Quine andArthur Prior as his allies, in that they held three truths: that there are no non-existent beings; that a proposition can occur in discourse without being there asserted; and that the sense of a term does not depend on the truth of the proposition in which it occurs. He is said to have invented the famous ethical example of the stuck potholer,[4] when arguing against the idea that it might be right to kill a child to save their mother.
Inmetaethics, a debate developed in the 1960s and 1970s as to whether it was possible to logically derive categorical 'ought' statements from 'is' statements. The debate famously involvedRichard Hare,Max Black,Philippa Foot andJohn Searle among others. Geach made a notable contribution to this debate with a paper published in 1977, which purported to derive one categorical 'ought' from purely factual premises.[21][22]
Geach has famously argued that the notion ofabsolute identity should be abandoned, to be replaced with relative identity predicates.[23][24]
Geach was elected aFellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965.[25] He was elected anhonorary fellow of Balliol College in 1979.[25] He was awarded the papal crossPro Ecclesia et Pontifice by theHoly See in 1999[26] for his philosophical work.
His wife and occasional collaborator was the philosopherElizabeth Anscombe.[17] Both converts toCatholicism, they were married atBrompton Oratory in 1941 and went on to have seven children.[27] They co-authored the 1961 bookThree Philosophers, with Anscombe contributing a section onAristotle and Geach one each on Aquinas andGottlob Frege.[17] For a quarter century they were leading figures in the Philosophical Enquiry Group, an annual confluence of Catholic philosophers held at Spode House in Staffordshire that was established byColumba Ryan in 1954.[28]
Peter Geach died on 21 December 2013[29] atAddenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and is buried in the same grave as his wife in (what is now) theAscension Parish Burial Ground.
 |
For more complete publication details see"Bibliography of works of P.T. Geach" (1991) by Harry A. Lewis.[30]
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Howison Lecturer in Philosophy 1963 | Succeeded by |
| Related articles |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Theories | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Concepts |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Philosophers |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
