Peter Geach Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Peter Geach died on 21 December 2013 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and is buried in the same grave as his wife in (what is now) the Ascension Parish Burial Ground.

For more complete publication details see “Bibliography of works of P.T. Geach” (1991) by Harry A. Lewis.

Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965. He was elected an honorary fellow of Balliol College in 1979. He was awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by the Holy See in 1999 for his philosophical work.

In metaethics, a debate developed in the 1960s and 1970s as to whether it was possible to logically derive categorical ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. The debate famously involved Richard Hare, Max Black, Philippa Foot and John Searle among others. Geach made a notable contribution to this debate with a paper published in 1977, which purported to derive one categorical ‘ought’ from purely factual premises.

In 1951, Geach was appointed to his first substantive academic post, as assistant lecturer at the University of Birmingham, going on to become Reader in Logic. In 1966 Geach resigned in protest at the University’s decision to create an Institute of Contemporary Culture. In his resignation letter he said he had no wish to stay at a university which “preferred Pop Art to Logic”. In the same year he was appointed Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Geach retired from his Leeds chair in 1981 with the title Emeritus Professor of Logic.

Geach refused to join the British Army in the Second World War and, as a conscientious objector, was employed in the war years in timber production. Following the end of the war in 1945, he undertook further research at Cambridge.

His wife and occasional collaborator was the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Both converts to Catholicism, they were married at Brompton Oratory in 1941 and went on to have 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 Columba Ryan in 1954.

Geach spent a year (1938–39) as a Gladstone Research Student, based at St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden.

In 1934 Geach won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with first-class honours in literae humaniores. At Oxford, he increasingly engaged in intellectual clashes with Catholics, through which he discovered the Catholic faith, later converting to the Roman Catholic Church. He later described it:

Peter Thomas Geach FBA (29 March 1916 – 21 December 2013) was a British philosopher who was Professor of Logic at the University of Leeds. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and the theory of identity.

Peter Geach was born in Chelsea, London, on 29 March 1916. He was the only son of George Hender Geach and his wife Eleonora Frederyka Adolfina née Sgonina. His father, who was employed in the Indian Educational Service, would go on to work as a professor of philosophy in Lahore and later as the principal of a teacher-training college in Peshawar.