Herbert Paul Grice and Peter Thomas Geach

Speranza

Catholic philosopher whose influence in logic and religion was profound

Peter Geach, like his wife Elizabeth Anscombe, was one of the most distinguished British philosophers of the 20th century. His contribution to the study of logic places him on a level with figures such as the Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, with whom Geach was friends. Geach’s work on the history of philosophy, especially on Thomas Aquinas, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, was groundbreaking. His writings on philosophy of religion, most of them produced when that area of inquiry was largely looked down on by many philosophers, helped people to appreciate its importance. His work on ethics, especially his seminal 1956 paper “Good and Evil”, contributed significantly to ways in which authors now deal with that subject.

Nobody who met Peter Geach could easily forget him. He was physically large and tended to tower over people. His intellect was as imposing as his stature. He could be sweepingly dismissive of views of which he disapproved, and he often spoke and wrote in an oracular fashion like an Old Testament prophet. In a letter written to someone he had never met but had read he alarmingly began, “I grieve to see that . . .” To a distinguished philosopher of religion he wrote lamenting that the philosopher had abandoned the creed of his forefathers in order to bow down before idols. Geach often intimidated or annoyed people. But the quality of his thinking, like the clarity of his prose, was outstanding.

Peter Thomas Geach was born in London in 1916, the son of George Hender Geach, who worked in the Indian Educational Service, and Eleonora Sgonina, the daughter of Polish emigrants. His parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and the couple eventually separated. All contact between Peter and his mother ceased from the time that he was four, and his earliest years were spent first living with his Polish grandparents in Cardiff and then with a certain Miss Tarr, an elderly relative. Geach was educated at Llandaff Cathedral School, Clifton College, Bristol, and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class degree in 1938. It was at Oxford that he met Anscombe, whom he married in 1941 and with whom he had three sons and four daughters. They were both Catholic converts.

Under the influence of his father, and in the light of his philosophical reading, Geach had varied in his religious positions as a teenager. In the year of his Oxford graduation, however, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Given the philosophical climate in which he spent most of his teaching life, he was, therefore, an exception to the rule. Yet his writings as a whole were not especially, or uncritically, religiously partisan. Geach had a keen sense of what can and cannot be cogently argued for philosophically. His treatments of religious themes display exactly the kind of intellectual expertise that one might expect from someone who was a key player among eminent philosophical peers. He treasured his contacts with Christadelphians (a group of religious believers founded in the 19th century), though they disagree with doctrinal positions to which he was firmly committed from the time of his conversion.

It was Geach’s father, “a very strange man”, as Geach once called him, who introduced him to philosophy. George Hender Geach studied moral sciences at Cambridge and later taught philosophy in Lahore. Subsequently unable to obtain an academic position in Britain, he spent a lot of his time trying to educate his son. In particular, he introduced him to the work of John McTaggart (1899-1925), an author to whom Geach was initially attracted. He was, for example, impressed by his critiques of belief in God and by his rejection of the reality of time and material objects. But Geach did not persevere in this way of thinking, though he said that McTaggart set him standards of rigour, clarity, and honesty while saving him from fashionable and pernicious errors. Geach’s regard for McTaggart can be seen in his book Truth, Love and Immortality (1979). From McTaggart, said Geach, “I learned much that has stayed by me: the preciousness of truth, the status of individual persons as bearers of value, the gloriousness of personal loving, and the hope of a blessed eternity”.

Geach’s father also taught him logic, in which Geach went on to excel. His contribution covered the history of logic, theories of reference and syntax, semantics, intentionality, truth, set theory, identity theory, and much else. Geach collected many of his own logical writings in Logic Matters (1972).

While living in Cambridge with Anscombe, where he became friends with Wittgenstein and occasionally taught for the university, Geach published articles in various journals, mostly Analysis and Mind, and made a name for himself academically. In 1951 he was appointed to the philosophy department at the University of Birmingham, where he became Reader in Logic in 1961. Unhappy there, he moved to hold the chair of logic at the University of Leeds. This appointment also gave him a chance to teach ancient and medieval philosophy.

In his later years Geach lectured in Europe and was frequently in demand in the US. He was especially keen on teaching in Poland since he came increasingly to cherish his Polish roots. He first taught in Poland in 1963. He learnt to speak Polish and published in that language.

Geach’s other major publications include: Mental Acts (1957), in which he focuses on abstractionism, understood as the theory that concepts are formed and exercised by noting recurrent features in experience, and on the notions of thought, sensation, and judgment; Three Philosophers (1961, co-written with his wife, in which Geach provides succinct and illuminating discussions of Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege; God and the Soul (1969), which covers topics such as reincarnation, existence, creation, worship, and prayer; Reason and Argument (1976), which is a solid introduction to logic based on courses that Geach taught at Leeds; and Truth and Hope (2001), which deals, among other things, with immortality, consistency, prophecy, and the goodness of God. Between 1971 and 1974 Geach delivered Stanton lectures at Cambridge. These were eventually published in two volumes under the titles Providence and Evil and The Virtues (1977).

His wife Elizabeth died in 2001. He is survived by his children.

Professor Peter Geach, philosopher, was born on March 29, 1916. He died on December 21, 2013, aged 97