Background
Geach, Peter Thomas was born in 1916 in London.
Geach, Peter Thomas was born in 1916 in London.
Ballid College, Oxford and St Deiniol's Library.
1951-1961, Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham. 1961-1966. Reader in Logic, University of Birmingham: 1966-1981, Professor of Logic, University of Leeds. 1985, Visiting Professor, University of Warsaw; 1965, Fellow of the British Academy.
Geach has written influentially in many of the Antral areas of philosophy, but his most important contribution has been the application of logical techniques to problems of language and •Metaphysics. His first book gives a logical analysis °f the notion of mental acts. Its greatest influence, however, came from its opposition to the empiricist doctrine of abstractionism, the view that concepts are formed by abstracting them from recurrent features of experience. In general, Geach’s view of the mind owes much to both Wittgenstein and Aristotle. Geach was never sympathetic to the ‘linguistic Philosophy’ of the 1950s and 1960s, and Reference and Generality (1962) used the techniques of formal logic to understand how referring expresSl°ns, and expressions of generality, are used in everyday language and thought. Its most influenUal view was perhaps the claim that identity claims are meaningless except as relative to some general term: ‘x = y' can only ever mean ‘x is the same something or other as y’. Geach's work in ethics has promoted the doctrine of the virtues’, and part of the groundwork for this was laid in his influential article Good and evil’ (1956). Here Geach attacked the prescriptivism that was fashionable at the time, arguing that the primary sense of ‘good’ is in fact descriptive. Goodness is not, however, a sui Seneris property, as the intuitionists had thought: rather, to be good is to be a good something, and •he nature of the something supplies the standards °f goodness. His work in the philosophy of religion has used ihe techniques and results of modern logic to defend traditional Roman Catholic doctrines. Geach’s work continues to be discussed, although •he notion of relative identity, highly influential during the 1960s and 1970s, has now largely been reJected. In ethics, however, the theory of the v>rtues remains central.