Oxonian Philosophers of Logic: Herbert Paul Grice and Peter Thomas Geach

Speranza

Peter Thomas Geach was a philosopher who argued that, far from being 'above logic’, the existence of God was in fact perfectly logical.

Grice preferred 'genitorial'. His view is best described as seeing his project as that of the 'creator' or 'genitor' -- what philosophers call the 'ideal-observer' approach.

Peter Geach is a formidable logician.

He happened to be married to one of the 20th century’s leading English-language philosophers, Irish-born G. E. M. Anscombe.

In a way, this meant Geach was overshadowed.

In another, it doesn't.

Geach did have a strong philosophical life of his own -- and I know people who have ONLY read Geach, but never Anscombe! --.

Further, without the thousands (literally) of hours of discussion that G. E. M. Anscombe had with him, *her* philosophy would not have attained the eminence it did.

Grice quotes Anscombe -- twice. In his unpublications he lists Anscombe as one (along with Murdoch) who NEVER attained a meeting with J. L. Austin on a Saturday morning. Not the Play Group type.

Geach always had sharp teeth in an argument and, the harder the opposition, the harder he bit.

In this he resembled Grice.

Geach's father was a Welsh-born philosopher, who never, since he was a gentleman, took up a paid position, but was properly educated at Cambridge -- Trinity to be more specific --.

It was under Geach senior's influence, that Geach junior got to admire, in his youth, the philosophy of J. M. E. McTaggart, the Edwardian Hegelian who espoused the positions that Geach came to reject:

-- atheism
-- re-incarnation
-- determinism, and
-- the unreality of time.

Still, Geach admired the irresistible force of reasoning that he found in the prose of McTaggart.

Geach writes:

“Under God, I owe my
very self to McTaggart for it
was knowledge of his philosophy
that kept alight in me a longing
for the infinite and eternal that
was not to be quenched by the
noisy winds of the world.”

Even after decades, Geach still thinks it important to publish an introduction to McTaggart’s philosophy: "Truth, Love, and Immortality".

Geach found his own feet while arguing against his master.

Thus, in response to McTaggart’s argument that it was impossible to believe in a solitary God, Geach showed how McTaggart’s demands for a deity were fulfilled only by the Holy Trinity of orthodox Christianity: three in one.

Not surprisingly, Geach's favourite hymn was "Holy, Holy, Holy", which got parodied during the War as "Raining, Raining, Raining".

In the philosophy of religion, Geach contributed to a better understanding of "existence", or the act of "being".

Geach makes an important distinction between

i. There is a God” and

ii. God is, or lives.

In the latter sense, Geach (but not Grice) claims that God is identical with his being.

Geach’s thinking on this question is touched on in "God and the Soul" and "Providence and Evil".

In ethics, G. E. M. Anscombe makes a celebrated rejection of a kind of utilitarianism that she named Consequentialism ("It's the consequences that matter", echoing Kant).

Since many modern ethicists reject a divine system of laws,  Miss Anscombe proposes a system of morals based on the Greek and Roman idea of virtue (or 'arete').

Some of Geach’s own ideas on virtue ethics were given in The Virtues, based on his Stanton Lectures.

There were some surprises.

“We ought, I think, to judge
about Cannabis indica
much as we judge about
 alcohol,” Geach said in one lecture.

“Cannabis indica
 appears to be less mentally
disturbing than alcohol, less
productive of damaging accidents
like car crashes, and very
much less addictive.”

In his paper “Good and Evil”, published in the journal "Analysis", Geach had shows how the meaning of the word “good” depended on the substantive or noun that it qualifies.

A  good apple is very different from a good knife.

And the best apple is not the best knife.

It was an influential insight, taken up by Philippa Foot among others, whom Grice quotes in CONCEPTION OF VALUE.

Geach notes that we can understand the meaning of 'good' in expressions like

"This is a good phylochronoteleobarometre."

even if we have no idea what a phylochronoteleobarometre is. A good phylochronoteleobarometre is a phylochronoteleobarometre that fulfils its goal.

Similarly, Grice would go on to argue, with 'humans'. A good human is a good person. A good person is a rational person, and more.

Unlike the dense, un-sign-posted prose of Miss Anscombe, Geach’s style was a pleasure to read.

And it was a pleasure to read because one feels, alla Grice, that it was a pleasure to WRITE!

In their joint volume Three Philosophers, G. E. M. Anscombe contributes a penetrating analysis of Aristotle that was a hard slog for readers, and Geach two sections: one on Aquinas that was both clear and full of new insights, and one on Frege in which the chief obstacle for the general reader was the mathematical language of the philosopher’s logic.

It was largely through Geach, whose lectures on Frege were encouraged by Wittgenstein, that the importance of Frege’s philosophy was realised in England -- for better or worse!

Grice disliked the idea of a Fregean sense. And on one occasion, when one of his graduate students at Berkeley told him that he meant to write his PhD dissertation on Frege, Grice was unamused.

"I'll base the thesis on Dummett's _Frege_, if you've read it."

"I haven't read it," answered Grice, "and I hope I won't".

----

Geach’s style was described by the philosopher Jenny Teichman as deliberately outrageous.

In opposition, I would describe Grice's style as outrageously deliberate.

Having sharpened his wits on philosophers as formidable as Hume or Russell, Geach seems fiercer than an Old Testament prophet and did not fear to give hard knocks to living philosophers.

There was something Old Testamentarian about Grice too, who would often refer to the ten commandments, and would love to lecture on issues "from Genesis to Revelations".

Yet some of Geach’s phrases became the common coin of philosophers, such as a “Cambridge change”, and "pleonetetic" (a lovely word for the logic of 'most' and 'many', not just 'all' -- also for 'few' and 'some').

This, a "Cambridge change", is the notion suggested by Bertrand Russell’s thought:

that Socrates changes if something can be predicated of him that could not be predicated before.

This relates to Grice's view on relative identity, which he came to develop via Wiggins, who was influenced by Geach ("Logic matters").

Thus if Socrates’s son grows bigger than him, it becomes true to say Socrates is shorter than his son, and so Socrates would have changed.

But this is not a real change, only a “Cambridge change” --. On the other hand, the changes that matter are specimens of what Grice calls an "Oxford change".

Geach’s interest in the thought of both Wittgenstein and Tomasso d'Aquino, the Italian philosopher,  made him an honorary founder of the philosophical school A. J. P. Kenny called  “analytical Thomism”.

But while Geach was a philosopher and Catholic, his philosophy went wherever the force of logic demanded, rather than being tailored to a religious conclusion.

“To me, it appears blasphemous to say God is 'above’ logic,” he wrote. ("To my wife it doesn't", he seems to be implicating).

“Logic is NOT partisan, and knows nothing but to strike straight."

"But the sword is invincible, bearing the Maker’s name.”

Peter Thomas Geach was born in Lower Chelsea, London on March 29 1916, the son of George Hender Geach, a Cambridge-educated Welsh-born philosopher, and Eleonora Sgonina, the daughter of Polish emigrants.

Herbert Paul Grice was born in Staffordshire in 1913, the son of Herbert Grice, a musician ("and dreadful businessman") and Mabel Felton, an aristocrat.

Grice went to live with his Polish grandparents in Cardiff, his mother having separated from his father when he was four.

Mrs. Geach went up in Oxford, writing against Mr. Geach!

-----

Peter Thomas Geach  was sent to Llandaff Cathedral, or rather, to the School therein, and then to Clifton (like Herbert Paul Grice).

Both Grice and Geach were awarded scholarships to attend Oxford: Grice ended up in Oxford's best college then: Corpus Christi.

Geach ended up in Balliol College, Oxford.

Grice gained a first in Greats. He became a Merton research student and later Fellow of St. John's (the best of Oxford's colleges).

Geach gained a first in Greats in 1938.

Geach was to spend the years 1945 to 1951 in philosophical research in Cambridge (under Witters and von Wright), and the next 15 years at Birmingham (Grice's country -- West Midlands -- Staffordshire border, Harborne), before being appointed Professor of Logic at Leeds.

Geach gave the Stanton Lectures in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge. Grice didn't. Instead, Grice gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford.

The year 1938 had seen Geach received into the Catholic Church. Grice remained an Anglican all his life ("I can be said to be committed to the 39 Articles even if I don't know what they mean").

1938 was, oddly, also the year Geach (but not Grice) met G. E. M. Anscombe, who had independently become a Catholic.

Once Anscombe had taken her finals, she married to Geach, on Boxing Day 1941, and decided that she should keep her beautiful maiden name (Geach kept his name, too).

With Anscombe, Geach had seven children, four of them girls. One of the girls is a philosopher, and a very good one, too.

Most of the apocryphal stories in academe about the children had some basis in reality.

For example, how they would at a tender age cook alarming meals for their parents and guests.

Or, how they would appear clothed strangely, or not at all, in the middle of some seminar.

Or how one child, on being told that if her teddy was not in the drawing room it MUT be in her bedroom, retorted:

“But that doesn’t follow.”

The reasoning behind this motivated Grice.

Your teddy is either in the drawing-room OR in your bedroom.
It's not in the drawing-room.
----- Therefore, it is in your bedroom.

If your teddy is not in the drawing-room it MUST be in your bedroom.

Versus:

If your teddy is not in the drawing-room IT MAY BE in your bedroom.

That _seems_ to follow. Or not.

The “Geachcombes”, though each sometimes holding a post elsewhere, shuttled between Oxford and Cambridge, where Geach got to know Witters. So, in the words of Philomena Lee, the Geachcombes count as Oxbridges.

Witters lodged with them in Oxford towards the end of his life.

Together, Geach and Anscombe translated Descartes’s "Philosophical Writings," directly from the French (or Latin).

In the fifties, while G. E. M. Anscombe was doing the work that became her dense, short and influential book on "Intention", Geach also turned his attention to the philosophy of mind in "Mental Acts", where his focus, as always, was mediaeval: he loved Occam. Or Ockham, as he preferred to spell him.

Peter Geach listed his recreations as reading stories of detection, mystery and horror; collecting and annotating old bad logic texts.

G. E. M. Anscombe died in 2001; Peter Geach is survived by his children.

Peter Geach, born March 29 1916, died December 21 2013.