RIP: Peter Geach

The death has occured of British philosopher and logician Peter Geach (1916-2013).
There is a famous story, perhaps apocryphal, of the logician Alfred Tarski, Polish-born but in American exile from WW II, asking his American City College of New York colleague Emil Post why he, Post, was the only prominent propositional logician who was not Polish.   Post replied that he was not born American, but had come to the USA as a child, and had in fact been born in Poland (although at the time part of the Russian empire).   It has seemed at times that Poland cornered the market in logicians and we find yet another example in Peter Geach.  According to his Guardian obituary, his maternal grandparents were Polish.

Long ago, I wrote an essay, in a logic course taught by Paul Thom and Malcolm Rennie, exploring a system of entailment due to Geach.  Then, as now, pure mathematicians mostly disparaged logic, and my university offered no further courses in the discipline that has since become the single most important to artificial intelligence and automated reasoning.   Universities are very good at preparing their graduates for the past; for the future, not so much.

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