Peter Geach

1.1. Birth and Family

Peter Geach was born in Chelsea, London, on 29 March 1916. He was the only son of George Hender Geach and Eleonora Frederyka Adolfina Sgonina. His father, who worked for the Indian Education Service, later became a professor of philosophy in Lahore and subsequently the principal of a teacher-training college in Peshawar. His parents' marriage was troubled and ended quickly. Until the age of four, Geach lived in Cardiff with his maternal grandparents, who were Polish immigrants. After this period, he was placed under the care of a guardian until his father returned to Britain, and contact with his mother and her parents ceased.

1.2. Childhood and Education

Geach attended Llandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff, and later Clifton College. His father, who had studied with philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge, introduced him to philosophy, beginning with logic. In 1934, Geach was awarded a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1938 with first-class honours in literae humaniores. While at Oxford, he engaged in intellectual debates with Catholics, which ultimately led him to discover and convert to the Roman Catholic Church. He described his conversion as a sudden collapse of his defenses, realizing he had to seek instruction in the Catholic religion to remain an honest man. He was received into the Catholic Church on May 31, 1938.

2.1. World War II Activities

During the Second World War, Geach declared himself a conscientious objector and was employed in timber production. Despite his initial stance, he later attempted, though unsuccessfully, to join the Free Polish Army.

2.2. University Appointments and Research

After graduating from Oxford, Geach spent a year, from 1938 to 1939, as a Gladstone Research Student at St Deiniol's Library in Hawarden. Following the end of the war in 1945, he pursued further research at the University of Cambridge. In 1951, Geach received his first substantive academic appointment as an assistant lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he later became a Reader in Logic. In 1966, he resigned from the University of Birmingham in protest against the university's decision to establish an Institute of Contemporary Culture, stating in his resignation letter that he had no desire to remain at a university that "preferred Pop Art to Logic." In the same year, he was appointed Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He retired from his professorship at Leeds in 1981, receiving the title of Emeritus Professor of Logic.

2.3. Visiting Professorships

Throughout his career, Geach held several visiting professorships at various international universities. These included Cornell, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Warsaw. He was also the Howison Lecturer in Philosophy in 1963.

3.1. Major Works and Philosophical Themes

His early and influential works include the classic texts Mental Acts (1957) and Reference and Generality (1962). In Reference and Generality, Geach defended a modern conception of reference against medieval theories of supposition, arguing for its superiority. His Catholic faith was not merely a personal belief but an integral and central element of his philosophical approach.

3.2. Analytical Thomism

Geach is widely regarded as a founder of analytical Thomism, a philosophical movement that aims to synthesize the philosophical traditions of Thomism (the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas) and analytic philosophy. Although the term "analytical Thomism" was only explicitly coined some forty years later by John Haldane, the intellectual current running through Geach's work, alongside that of his wife Elizabeth Anscombe, laid the groundwork for this synthesis.

3.3. Wittgenstein's Influence

While at the University of Cambridge, Geach was a student and an early follower of the influential philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's philosophical methods and ideas significantly shaped Geach's own approach to philosophical problems, particularly in the areas of logic and language.

3.4. Views on Reason and Human Nature

Geach strongly defended the Thomistic position that human beings are fundamentally rational animals, each believed to be miraculously created. He dismissed Darwinian attempts to consider reason as inessential to humanity, characterizing such views as "mere sophistry, laughable, or pitiable." Furthermore, he explicitly repudiated any capacity for language in animals, asserting that their communication amounted to nothing more than a "mere association of manual signs with things or performances."

3.5. Theory of Truth

Geach rejected both pragmatic and epistemic conceptions of truth, instead advocating for a version of the correspondence theory of truth as proposed by Thomas Aquinas. He argued that there is a single reality rooted in God himself, whom he considered the ultimate truthmaker. According to Geach, God is truth. He regarded philosophers like W. V. Quine and Arthur Prior as allies because they shared three key beliefs: that non-existent beings do not exist; that a proposition can occur in discourse without being asserted; and that the sense of a term does not depend on the truth of the proposition in which it occurs.

3.6. Metaphysics and Identity

In the field of metaphysics, Geach famously argued for the abandonment of the notion of absolute identity. Instead, he proposed that it should be replaced with relative identity predicates, suggesting that identity is always relative to a kind or sortal concept.

3.7. Metaethics and the 'Ought'/'Is' Debate

Geach made a notable contribution to the metaethical debate of the 1960s and 1970s concerning the logical derivation of categorical 'ought' statements from 'is' statements. This debate famously involved philosophers such as Richard Hare, Max Black, Philippa Foot, and John Searle. In a paper published in 1977, Geach claimed to have derived a categorical 'ought' from purely factual premises, a significant intervention in the discussion.

3.8. Ethical Examples

Among his contributions to ethical philosophy, Geach is credited with inventing the famous "stuck potholer" scenario. He used this example in his arguments against the idea that it might be morally permissible to kill a child to save their mother, illustrating complex ethical dilemmas.

4.1. Marriage and Family

Geach's wife and occasional philosophical collaborator was the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Both were converts to Catholicism. They were married at Brompton Oratory in 1941 and had seven children. Their intellectual partnership extended to their work, notably in their co-authored 1961 book Three Philosophers, where Anscombe contributed a section on Aristotle and Geach wrote on Aquinas and Gottlob Frege. For a quarter century, Geach and Anscombe were leading figures in the Philosophical Enquiry Group, an annual gathering of Catholic philosophers held at Spode House in Staffordshire, which was established by Columba Ryan in 1954.

5.1. Academic Honours

In recognition of his scholarly achievements, Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965. He was further honored in 1979 when he was elected an honorary fellow of Balliol College, his alma mater.

5.2. Papal Commendation

For his profound philosophical work and its alignment with Catholic thought, Geach was awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by the Holy See in 1999. This commendation recognized his distinguished service to the Church and the Pope.

7.1. Major Books and Edited Volumes

• (edited, with Max Black) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 1952 (2nd ed. 1960, 3rd ed. 1980)
• Descartes: Philosophical Writings (with G.E.M. Anscombe), 1954
• 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
• Providence and Evil: The Stanton Lectures 1971-2, 1977
• The Virtues: The Stanton Lectures 1973-4, 1977
• 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 with 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, 2001

7.2. Notable Articles

• "Good and Evil," Analysis (1956)
• "Ascriptivism," Philosophical Review (1960), reprinted in Richard Rorty (ed.) The Linguistic Turn (1967)
• "PLATO'S "PLATO'S EUTHYPHRO": An Analysis and Commentary", The Monist (1966)
• "Some Problems about Time," Proceedings of the British Academy (1966)
• "Form and Existence," in Kenny, A. (eds) Aquinas. Modern Studies in Philosophy (1969)
• "Nominalism," in Kenny, A. (eds) Aquinas. Modern Studies in Philosophy (1969)
• "A Program for Syntax," Synthèse (1970), reprinted in Davidson & Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language (1972)
• "Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein," Acta Philosophica Fennica (1976)
• "Again the Logic of 'Ought'," Philosophy (1977)
• "Truth and God," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LVI (1982)
• "Whatever Happened to Deontic Logic," reprinted in Logic and Ethics (edited by Geach with Jacek Holowka) (1990)

7.3. Festschriften

• Gormally, Luke, ed. (1994). Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
• Lewis, Harry A., ed. (1991). Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters. Dordrecht: Springer.