Peter Singer

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Lore & Background

Peter Geach was born in Chelsea, London, on 29 March 1916, the only son of George Hender Geach and Eleonora Frederyka Adolfina (née Sgonina). His father, employed in the Indian Educational Service, worked as a professor of philosophy in Lahore and later as principal of a teacher-training college in Peshawar. His parents' marriage was unhappy and quickly broke up. Until age four, Geach lived with his Polish immigrant maternal grandparents in Cardiff, then was placed with a guardian until his father returned to Britain; contact with his mother and her parents ceased. He attended Llandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff and later Clifton College. His father, who had studied with Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge, taught him philosophy starting with logic. In 1934 Geach won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with first-class honours in literae humaniores. At Oxford, he engaged in intellectual clashes with Catholics, through which he discovered the Catholic faith, later converting to the Roman Catholic Church. He described it: 'I was certainly cleverer than they, but they had the immeasurable advantage that they were right—an advantage that they did not throw away by resorting to the bad philosophy and apologetics then sometimes taught in Catholic schools. One day my defences quite suddenly collapsed: I knew that if I were to remain an honest man I must seek instruction in the Catholic Religion. I was received into the Catholic Church on 31 May 1938.'

Geach spent a year (1938–39) as a Gladstone Research Student at St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden. He refused to join the British Army in the Second World War and, as a conscientious objector, was employed in timber production; he later tried unsuccessfully to join the Free Polish Army. After the war in 1945, he undertook further research at Cambridge. In 1951, Geach was appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Birmingham, becoming Reader in Logic. In 1966 he resigned in protest at the university's decision to create an Institute of Contemporary Culture, saying he had no wish to stay at a university which 'preferred Pop Art to Logic'. That same year he was appointed Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, retiring in 1981 with the title Emeritus Professor of Logic. He held visiting professorships at Cornell, Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Warsaw.

Reader's Guide

Geach's early work includes the classic texts *Mental Acts* and *Reference and Generality*, the latter defending a 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, aiming to synthesise Thomistic and analytic approaches. Geach was a student and early follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge. He defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentially rational animals, each miraculously created, dismissing 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 pragmatic and epistemic conceptions of truth, commending a version of the correspondence theory proposed by Thomas Aquinas, arguing that there is one reality rooted in God himself, who is the ultimate truthmaker. He saw W. V. Quine and Arthur Prior as allies in holding 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 is said to have 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 their mother. In metaethics, Geach made a notable contribution to the 'is-ought' debate with a 1977 paper purporting to derive one categorical 'ought' from purely factual premises. He famously argued that the notion of absolute identity should be abandoned, replaced with relative identity predicates. Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1965, an honorary fellow of Balliol College in 1979, and awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by the Holy See in 1999 for his philosophical work. His wife and occasional collaborator was the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe; both converts to Catholicism, they married at Brompton Oratory in 1941 and had seven children. They co-authored the 1961 book *Three Philosophers*, with Anscombe on Aristotle and Geach on Aquinas and Gottlob Frege. For a quarter century they were leading figures in the Philosophical Enquiry Group, an annual confluence of Catholic philosophers at Spode House in Staffordshire established by Columba Ryan in 1954. Peter Geach died on 21 December 2013 at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and is buried in the same grave as his wife in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground.

Did You Know?

• Geach was received into the Catholic Church on 31 May 1938 after intellectual clashes with Catholics at Oxford.
• He resigned from the University of Birmingham in 1966 because it 'preferred Pop Art to Logic'.
• Geach and his wife Elizabeth Anscombe co-authored the 1961 book *Three Philosophers* on Aristotle, Aquinas, and Frege.
• He was awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by the Holy See in 1999.
• Geach is said to have invented the famous ethical example of the stuck potholer.