Herbert Paul Grice and Peter Thomas Geach

Speranza

Peter Thomas Geach was a Catholic philosopher whose influence in logic and religion was profound; Grice wasn't -- implicature: a Catholic, but he too was a philosopher whose influence in logic (if not religion) was profound.

It may do to discuss in what ways Grice was not a Catholic and in what ways his influence in religion was not profound.

Peter Thomas Geach, like his wife G. E. M. Anscombe, was one of the most distinguished English philosophers of the 20th and 21th centuries.

Geach's contribution to the study of LOGIC (cfr. Bartlett's description of Grice as a "British logician") places him on a level with figures such as the Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, with whom Geach was friends.

It places him on a level, also, with:

P. F. Strawson, whom Geach loved to criticise; and
Herbert Paul Grice, whom Strawson quotes in "Introduction to Logical Theory" that Geach loved to criticise.

Geach’s work on the history of philosophy, especially on the Italian philsopher Thomas Aquinas, but also German speaking philosophers such as Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, was groundbreaking.

He also edited the work of the English speaking philosopher from New Zealand, A. N. Prior.

Geach's 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.

One of Grice's unpublications is entitled, "From Genesis to Revelations": the importance of the philosophy of religion, Grice argued, was a private matter. His father, Herbert Grice, of Harborne, was a non-Conformist.

Geach's work on meta-ethics, especially his seminal 1956 paper “Good and Evil”, contributed significantly to ways in which authors now deal with that subject.

Geach was especially concerned with what, with Herbert Paul Grice, we may call the 'conversational implicature' of things like:

He is a good x.

Grice's example:

Paul is good.
Paul is a philosopher
----
Therefore; Paul is a good philosopher (INVALID).

For Geach, 'good' is descriptive. For Grice, drawing on Hare, it is a mere neustic.

----

Nobody who met Peter Geach could easily forget him.

Similarly, everyone who did not meet Herbert Paul Grice may not that EASILY remember him!

---

Geach, like Grice was physically large and tended to tower over people.

Grice was athletic in that he spent half of his Oxford time playing cricket. His "Times" obituary read, "Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer" (or "Amateur cricketer and professional philosopher", I forget).

Geach's intellect was as imposing as his stature.

This above is a metaphor, or as Dorothy Parker would say, a zeugma.

----Grice would disagree: "There is nothing in the word 'impose' that marks its figurative, or, for that matter, literal, level".

Geach 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.

Similarly, one of Grice's unpublications reads, "From Genesis to Revelations".

Geach's prophecies are perhaps more popular.

---- It may be nice to list them.

In a letter written to someone he had never met but had read he alarmingly began,

“I grieve to see that . . .”

------- He was using 'grieve' as a propositional attitude. Cfr. his "Mental Acts". In British colloquial speech, most of these propositional attitudes, Geach feared, were losing their literal 'meaning'. "I grieve" is also what Grice's colleague, J. O. Urmson, would call a parenthetical:

I see, I grieve, that.

I see it, I grieve.

To a distinguished philosopher of religion, Geach wrote lamenting that the philosopher had abandoned the creed of his forefathers in order to bow down before idols.

He did not use the capital "I" in "idol", which infuriated this distinguished philosopher.

All Graeco-Roman philosophers worshipped 'idols', as did Hobbes -- 'Idols of the Market Place'.

Geach often intimidated or annoyed people.

This may require what Geach called 'pleonetetic quantification':

Geach most of the time annoye most of the people he met.
Geach often annoyed a few people.

Cfr.

Grice charmed everyone.
Or:
Everyone was charmed by Grice.

But the quality of Geach's thinking (and more important, its verbalisation), like the clarity of his prose, was outstanding.

Peter Thomas Geach was born in Lower Chelsea, London in 1916, the son of George Hender Geach, who was a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, and Eleonora Frederycka Adolphina Sgonina Geach, a fellow of Somerville College (under Dorothy Sayers), who was the daughter of Polish emigrants.

Geach learned Polish from his mother and maternal grandparents. From his father, who was Cardiff-born, he learned English.

His parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and the couple eventually separated. Mrs. Geach ended up in Oxford writing poetry against the marriage, which was oddly reviewed by T. S. Eliot.

All contact between Peter and his mother ceased from the time that he was four.

His earliest years were spent, first, living with his Polish grandparents in Cardiff and then with a certain Miss Tarr, an elderly relative.

Miss Tarr was a sort of a Mary Poppins. -- KEYWORD: "MISS TARR". Geach possibly enjoyed the logical consequences of Miss Tarr.

Geach was educated at Llandaff Cathedral School.

He later was enrolled, by his father, in Clifton College, Bristol, and then Balliol.

Odd the choice seeing that his father had Cantab. legacies.

At Balliol, Geach obtained a first-class degree in Lit. Hum. 1938.

It was at Oxford that he met G. E. M. Anscombe, whom he married in 1941 into what he would like to refer as the "Geachcombes", and with whom he had three sons and four daughters.

They were both Catholic converts.

Mary Geach, one of their daughters, is a brilliant philosopher.

It was a philosophical fertile marriage in more than one way. Geach commuted -- mainly to Cambridge. He died while living in his nice home on Richmond Road, Cambridge.

Under the influence of Geach's father, and in the light of his philosophical reading, Geach had varied in his religious positions as a "teenager", already, if we may use an Americanism.

In the year of his Oxford graduation, however, Grice was received into the Roman Catholic Church -- by the Catholic Church. (The word 'receive' NEEDS a 'by'-clause).

Given the philosophical climate in which Geach spent most of his teaching life, Geach was, therefore, an exception to the rule.

He was NO atheist.

Yet Geach's 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. This he did NOT derive from his idol, Thomas Aquinas, who would confuse these issues miserably!

Geach's 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.

Geach treasured his contacts with the "Christadelphians", an infamous group of religious believers founded in the 19th century.

Geach, however, disagreed with the Christadelphians, with doctrinal positions to which he was firmly committed from the time of his conversion.

It was actually Geach’s father, “a very strange man”, as Geach once called him -- where the implicature of 'strange' -- or 'very' for that matter -- was never explicated or cancelled -- who introduced him to philosophy.

George Hender Geach had studied moral sciences at Trinity, Cambridge.

Subsequently unable to obtain an academic position at Cambridge, he spent a lot of his time trying to educate his son into a 'philosopher'.

Geach was thus Oxbridge in that his father was Cambridge and he himself was Oxford (although he did post-graduate with Witters and von Wright in Cambridge).

In particular, Geach senior introduced Geach junior to the work of John McTaggart (1899-1925), an author to whom Geach was initially attracted.

There's a lot of appeal in McTaggart -- Dummett idolised him, too.

Geach was especially impressed by McTaggart's critiques of belief in God and by his rejection of the reality of time and material objects.

McTaggart was, like the early Grice, a 'phenomenalist' in the empiricist tradition.

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 "Truth, Love and Immortality".

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”.

On the other hand, Strawson wrote of Grice:

"From Mr. Grice I learned all I know about logic".

Geach’s father also taught him logic, in which Geach went on to especially excel, if you allow us the split infinitive.

Geach's contribution covered:

-- the history of logic
-- theories of reference and syntax
-- semantics
-- intentionality
-- truth
-- set theory
-- relative identity theory,
-- and much else. ESPECIALLY much else.

Geach collected many of his own logical writings in the over-brilliant, Logic Matters.

While living in Cambridge with G. E. M. Anscombe, where he became friends with Witters ("Some like Witters, but Moore's my man" -- Austin) and occasionally TAUGHT for the university -- a point seldom mentioned in his record of academic achievements --, Geach published articles in various journals, mostly Analysis and Mind, and made a name for himself academically.

In 1951 Geach was appointed to the philosophy department at Birmingham, where he became Reader in Logic in 1961.

Unhappy there, Geach moved to hold the chair of logic at Leeds.

This appointment also gave him a chance to teach ancient and medieval philosophy -- which was just what he needed. He loved the Yorkshire moors, too.

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. Although possibly he was pretty familar with the 'lingo' as overheard at his maternal grandparents' house in Cardiff.

Geach’s publications are varied.

"Mental Acts" 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, co-written with his wife, provides succinct and illuminating discussions of Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege.

"God and the Soul" covers topics such as reincarnation, existence, creation, worship, and prayer;

"Reason and Argument" is a solid introduction to logic based on courses that Geach taught at Leeds.

"Truth and Hope" deals, among other things, with immortality, consistency, prophecy, and the goodness of God.

Geach also delivered Stanton lectures at Cambridge.

These were eventually published in two volumes under the titles "Providence and Evil" and "The Virtues"

G. E. M. Anscombe died in 2001.

Geach is survived by his children.

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