Peter Geach

Early life

Peter Geach was born in London in 1916 to George Hender Geach, a professor of philosophy in Lahore and Cambridge, and Eleonora Adolfina Sgonina, a poet, and spent his earliest years in Cardiff. He attended Llandaff Cathedral School and Clifton College. He received instruction in logic and philosophy from his father who, as a member of the Indian Educational Service, had been professor of philosophy at Lahore and later principal of a teacher training college in Peshawar. His parents' marriage was unhappy and quickly broke up. Until around the age of eight, Peter lived with his maternal grandparents in Cardiff, after which time he was sent off to school by his father and raised by a guardian. Geach never saw his mother again after childhood.

In 1934 Geach won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with a First in Literae Humaniores.

Academic career

Geach spent a year (1938–39) as a Gladstone Research Student, based at St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden. Following the end of World War II in 1945, he undertook further research at Cambridge.

In 1951, Geach was appointed to his first substantive academic post, as Assistant Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, going on to become Reader in Logic. In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Geach retired from his chair in 1981 with the title Emeritus Professor of Logic. He also held Visiting Professorships at the universities of Cornell, Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Warsaw.

Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College in 1979.

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 Professor 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 Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and is buried in what is now the Ascension Parish Burial Ground.