Peter Geach

Peter Geach
Born	(1916-03-29)29 March 1916 Chelsea, London
Died	21 December 2013(2013-12-21) (aged 97) Cambridge
Era	20th-century
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophical logic, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion
Notable ideas	Analytical Thomism, Omnipotence paradox

Peter Thomas Geach, MA, FBA, (/ˈɡiːtʃ/; 29 March 1916 – 21 December 2013) was a British philosopher. His areas of interest were the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.

Geach was educated at Clifton College and at Balliol College, Oxford. He taught at the University of Birmingham from 1951 until 1966 when he was appointed Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Geach was given the title of Emeritus Professor of Logic on his retirement from Leeds in 1981.

Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965.

He was awarded the papal cross "Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice" by the Holy See for his philosophical work.

Thought

His early work includes the classic texts Mental Acts and Reference and Generality, the latter defending an essentially modern conception of reference against medieval theories of supposition. His Catholic perspective was integral to his philosophy. He was perhaps the founder of Analytical Thomism (though the current of thought running through his and Elizabeth Anscombe's work to the present day was only ostensibly so named forty years later by John Haldane), the aim of which is to synthesise Thomistic and Analytic approaches. Geach was a student and an early follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein whilst at Cambridge University.

Geach defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentially rational animals, each one miraculously created. He dismissed Darwinistic attempts to regard reason as inessential to humanity, as "mere sophistry, laughable, or pitiable." He repudiated any capacity for language in animals as mere "association of manual signs with things or performances."

Geach dismissed both pragmatic and epistemic conceptions of truth, commending a version of the correspondence theory proposed by 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 saw W.V. Quine and Arthur 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 invented the famous ethical example of the stuck potholer, when arguing against the idea that it might be right to kill a child to save its mother. Jenny Teichman, fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, has characterised Geach's philosophical style as "deliberately outrageous".

Personal life

His wife and occasional collaborator was the philosopher and Wittgenstein scholar Elizabeth Anscombe. Both converts to Roman Catholicism, they married in 1941 and had seven children. They co-authored the 1961 book Three Philosophers, with Anscombe contributing a section on Aristotle and Geach one each on Aquinas and Gottlob Frege. 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 by Father Columba Ryan in 1954. Peter Geach died early in the morning on 21 December 2013 at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge

Selected publications

• (edited, with Max Black) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 1952/1960/1966
• "Good and Evil," Analysis (1956)
• Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects, 1957/1997
• Three Philosophers: Aristotle; Aquinas; Frege (with G.E.M. Anscombe), 1961
• Reference and Generality: An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories, 1962
• History of the corruptions of logic, inaugural lecture, University of Leeds, 1968
• God and the Soul, 1969/2001
• Logic Matters, 1972
• Reason and Argument, 1976
• "Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein," Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 (1976): 54–70
• Truth, Love, and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy, 1979
• (edited) Wittgenstein's Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47: Notes by P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah, and A.C. Jackson, 1989
• Logic and Ethics (edited by Jacek Holowka), 1990
• Truth and Hope: The Furst Franz Josef und Furstin Gina Lectures Delivered at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein, 1998 (ISBN 0-268-04215-2)

See also

• Omnipotence levels

External links

• Obituary of Peter Geach in The Telegraph