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Peter Thomas Geach, MA, FBA ( /ˈɡiːtʃ/; born 29 March 1916) is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.

Geach was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He taught at Birmingham University (1951–1966) and from 1966 at the University of Leeds where he was Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy. Geach was given the title of Emeritus Professor of Logic on his retirement in 1981.

Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965.

He has been 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 is integral to his philosophy. He is 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. He defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentially rational animals, each one miraculously created. He dismisses Darwinistic attempts to regard reason as inessential to humanity, as "mere sophistry, laughable, or pitiable." He repudiates any capacity for language in animals as mere "association of manual signs with things or performances."

Geach dismisses 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.

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 noted philosopher and Wittgenstein scholar 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.

Selected publications

• (edited, with Max Black) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 1952/1960/1966
• "Good and Evil," Analysis (1956)
• Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects, 1957/1997
• Three Philosophers: Aristotle; Aquinas; Frege (with G.E.M. Anscombe), 1961
• Reference and Generality: An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories, 1962
• History of the corruptions of logic, inaugural lecture, University of Leeds, 1968
• God and the Soul, 1969/2001
• Logic Matters, 1972
• Reason and Argument, 1976
• "Saying and Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein," Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 (1976): 54-70
• Truth, Love, and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy, 1979
• (edited) Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47: Notes by P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah, and A.C. Jackson, 1989
• Logic and Ethics (edited by Jacek Holowka), 1990
• Truth and Hope: The Furst Franz Josef und Furstin Gina Lectures Delivered at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein, 1998 (ISBN 0-268-04215-2)

See also

• Omnipotence levels

Footnotes