{"id":6041,"date":"2013-12-27T12:57:05","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T12:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=6041"},"modified":"2023-07-28T21:44:58","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T21:44:58","slug":"rip-peter-geach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/rip-peter-geach\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP:  Peter Geach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The death has occured of British philosopher and logician&nbsp;Peter Geach (1916-2013).<br \/>\nThere is a famous story, perhaps apocryphal, of the logician Alfred Tarski, Polish-born but in American exile from WW II,&nbsp;asking his American City College of New York colleague Emil Post why he, Post,&nbsp;was the only prominent propositional logician who was not Polish.&nbsp;&nbsp; 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).&nbsp;&nbsp; It has seemed at times&nbsp;that Poland cornered the market in logicians&nbsp;and we find yet another example in Peter Geach.&nbsp; According to his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/education\/2013\/dec\/26\/peter-geach\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Guardian obituary<\/a>, his maternal grandparents were Polish.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>Long ago, I wrote an essay, in a logic course taught by <a href=\"http:\/\/paulthom.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Paul Thom<\/a>&nbsp;and <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2009\/09\/australian-logic-a-salute-to-malcolm-rennie\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Malcolm Rennie<\/a>, exploring a system of entailment due to Geach.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;&nbsp; Universities are very good at preparing their graduates for the past; for the future, not so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The death has occured of British philosopher and logician&nbsp;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,&nbsp;asking his American City College of New York colleague Emil Post why he, Post,&nbsp;was the only prominent propositional logician who was not Polish.&nbsp;&nbsp; Post replied [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-logic","category-obits","p1","y2013","m12","d27","h12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11476,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions\/11476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}