A SHORT NOTE ON A PHILOSOPHER

PETER GEACH

              Peter Thomas Geach is one of the leading British philosophers who have given remarkable contributions in the field of history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity. He was born on 29^th March 1916 at Chelsea in London. His notable ideas include Analytical Thomism and Omnipotence paradox. He taught at the University of Birmingham from 1951 until 1966 when he was appointed as the Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He was given the title of Emeritus Professor of Logic on his retirement from Leeds in 1981. Geach was elected as 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. In 1941 he married Elizabeth Anscombe who was his occasional collaborator and a noted philosopher and Wittgenstein scholar. His early work includes the classic texts, Mental Acts and Reference and Generality, the latter defends an essentially modern conception of reference against medieval theories of supposition. Both Anscombe and Geach co-authored the 1961 book Three Philosophers, with Anscombe contributing a section on Aristotle and Geach one each on Aquinas and Gottlob Frege.

Analytical Thomism

                          The Catholic perspective of Geach is integral to his philosophy. He is perhaps the founder of Analytical Thomism the aim of which is to synthesize Thomistic and Analytic approaches. He defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentially rational animals, and each one is 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." 

Concepts of God and Truth

                       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 truth maker. God, according to Geach, is truth. He describes and rejects four levels of omnipotence. He also defines and defends a lesser notion of the "almightiness" of God. God is absolutely omnipotent means that he can do everything absolutely. Everything that can be expressed in a string of words even if it can be shown to be self-contradictory, God is not bound in action, as we are in thought by the laws of logic.

Good and Evil

                          There is no such objective truth. Good and evil are always attributive, not predicative adjectives. There is no such thing as just good and bad. There is only being a god or bad. If one says that something is good or bad thing, either thing is a mere substitute for a more descriptive noun to be supplied from the context; or else he is trying to use good or bad predicatively, and its being grammatically attributive is a mere disguise. Thus goodness is said to be a non natural attribute, and objectivism is a naturalistic fallacy. It doesn’t explain how good differs logically from other terms.