Peter Geach

Peter Thomas Geach (born March 29, 1916 in London , † December 21, 2013 ) was a British philosopher and logician .

Life

Peter Geach was the son of George Hender Geach, professor of philosophy in Lahore and Cambridge , and Eleonora Adolfina Sgonina, a daughter of Polish emigrants. From a very young age he dealt with philosophical authors, some of whom he repeatedly cites either in approval or disapproval (such as the logicians John Neville Keynes and John McTaggart ). He studied philosophy at Balliol College , Oxford . In 1938 he converted - like Elizabeth Anscombe , whom he married in 1941, Michael Dummett and other important English philosophers of the 20th century - to the Catholic faith . Via Anscombe he came into contact with Ludwig Wittgenstein , who, although never his academic teacher, nevertheless exerted considerable influence on him.

From 1945 to 1951 Geach was unemployed and tried to make a name for himself with his publications. From 1951 to 1966 he taught logic in Birmingham and from 1966 to 1981 in Leeds . Since 1963 he has appeared as a visiting professor in Poland and has published several articles in Polish. Since 1965 he was a member of the British Academy .

plant

logic

Although Geach is considered to be one of the greatest British philosophers of his generation alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Anthony Kenny and Michael Dummett, there is no "philosophy of Geach" in the same sense as with Willard Van Orman Quine , Donald Davidson or Dummett of certain associated with their names Basic ideas or a teaching based on such basic ideas can be discussed. The reception of his works is linked to certain individual theses that serve as fixed points of reference for discussion within analytical philosophy . These include, for example, his considerations on the logical structure of names, the concept of (relative) identity and the reference of quantified statements.

Geach's first publications were mostly about logic. However, Geach worked less in the field of theoretical logic - although he has also published some articles on relational logic and set theory - but dealt with the question of the logical analysis of natural languages.

The works of Gottlob Frege and von Wittgenstein are a constant point of reference in his considerations . In contrast to the representatives of the American school of Rudolf Carnap on the one hand and the followers of Ordinary Language Philosophy on the other, for Geach there is no separation of Wittgenstein's work into an early one, determined by the logical-philosophical treatise , and into one late phase defined by the Philosophical Investigations . That is why Geach does not - like the Carnap school - deal with the problems of a logical ideal language, but in his investigations into the semantics and logic of natural languages ​​he does not - like the philosophers of normal language - dispense with logical formalization . On this point, Geach's work is very close to that of Michael Dummett .

Geach was one of the first authors within analytical philosophy to systematically refer to scholastic authors and thus contributed to the strong appreciation that medieval philosophy has experienced in the English-language discussion over the last few decades. In particular, he dealt with the work of Thomas Aquinas , which he freed from a neo-scholastic narrow understanding and whose philosophical rank he brought back to bear in the context of discussion of analytical thinking. The Thomas interpretation advocated by Geach together with Anthony Kenny is called "analytical Thomism". He is also the editor of the works of Paulus Venetus .

In addition, Geach dealt with questions of the philosophy of psychology ; the 1957 book Mental Acts is considered a modern classic of philosophy.

Philosophy of religion

Clearly separated from the work on logic and other typical problems of analytical philosophy are Geach's work on the philosophy of religion . Geach advocates a strict Catholicism that is also orthodox in that it insists on consistent rationalism .

In several lectures, Geach presented key pieces of teaching in Catholic philosophy of religion and showed how concepts of an essentialist philosophy ("essence", "soul", "immortality") that had fallen out of fashion , as Thomas used them, but also moral-philosophical concepts such as sin, were used and let virtue be used at the level of modern philosophy.

Publications

author

• Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege . Together with Max Black . Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952.
• Descartes. Philosophical Writings . Together with GEM Anscombe. London: Nelson, 1954.
• Mental Acts, Their Content and Their Objects. London, New York: Routledge & Kegan, 1957.
• Three philosophers. Aristotle - Aquinas - Frege. With GEM Anscombe, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1961.
• Reference and generality. An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962, 3rd revid. 1980 edition.
• God and the soul. London, New York: Routledge & Kegan; Schocken, 1969. (Collection of articles)
• Logic Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. (Collection of articles)
• Reason and argument. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976.
• Providence and evil. The Stanton Lectures, 1971-2. London: Cambridge UP, 1977.
• The Virtues. The Stanton Lectures 1973-4. London: Cambridge UP, 1977.
• Truth, Love and Immortality. An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy . Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979.
• Truth and hope. The Fürst Franz Josef and Fürstin Gina lectures delivered at the International Academy of Philosophy in the principality of Liechtenstein, 1998. University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. ISBN 0-268-04215-2

editor

• Wittgenstein's Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946-47. Notes by PT Geach, KJ Shah, AC Jackson. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988.
• with Fernando Inciarte , Robert Spaemann : Personal responsibility. Adamas-Verlag, Cologne 1982 (with own contribution in German).

Secondary literature

• Harry A. Lewis (Ed.): Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters . Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1991. (= Synthesis Library; 213.) (with bibliography and an autobiography by Geach)
• Luke Gormally (Ed.): Moral Truth and Moral Tradition. Essays in Honor of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994.
• Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Geach , in: Mittelstraß (Hrsg.), Encyclopedia Philosophy and Philosophy of Science , 2nd edition, Vol. 3 (2008), ISBN 978-3-476-02102-1 (with a detailed list of works and literature)
• Anthony Kenny: Peter Thomas Geach, 1916-2013 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy . tape XIV , 2015, p. 185-203 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Geach in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Geach. Obituary in The Daily Telegraph , Jan. 14, 2014 (accessed November 2017)