Natural Goodness, Sex, and the Perverted Faculty Argument

There is a longstanding and widely held view, often associated with Catholicism, that intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts are intrinsically immoral. Some philosophers who hold this view, such as Edward Feser, claim that they can defend the view on purely philosophical grounds by relying on the perverted faculty argument. This paper argues that Feser's defense of the perverted faculty argument does not work because Feser fails to recognize the full implications of the species-dependence of natural goodness. By drawing on the work of Peter Geach and Philippa Foot, this paper presents a view of natural goodness that adequately accounts for the species-dependence of such goodness. Using this adequate account, the paper argues that at least some intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts contribute to human flourishing.

Late Twentieth-Century Reception of Aquinas in Analytical Philosophy

Within two decades of Bertrand Russell writing, ‘There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas’ (Russell 1945), interest in Thomas’s ideas had begun to develop among philosophers in the ‘analytic’ or ‘analytical’ tradition of which Russell had been one of the founders. The causes of this were several, but prominent were first, a reaction against a strong reductive and scientistic strand in that tradition, viz. ‘logical positivism’; second, the interest taken in Aquinas by Peter Geach following his conversion to Roman Catholicism; and third, the activities of British Dominicans in translating Aquinas’s Summae, and in organizing meetings between lay philosophers and priests and other religious to discuss themes from Aquinas and issues in contemporary secular philosophy. From this beginning, and advanced by the work of Anthony Kenny, interest developed in Britain, Australia, and the United States, and then beyond the Anglophone world.

The Cloud or the Raindrops?

The birth and death of a person constitute (existential) changes in that individual. This idea is challenged, however, by Thomas Aquinas—supported by Peter Geach—who believes that no change can involve the very existence of the subject of that change. It is argued, however, that Aquinas’s position is indefensible, since it involves denying that before Socrates existed, it was a fact that he didn’t exist. Another challenge, however, arises from the thesis of C. S. Peirce—supported by A. N. Prior—that before Socrates was born, there was not even the possibility of his existence, since possibility is always general, individuality arising only from existence itself. An argument is presented, however, that Peirce’s thesis cannot be accepted. More generally, attention is drawn to the importance of the commonsense notion of individuals.

Who is almighty?

Peter Geach recommended conceiving of God as almighty, not as omnipotent. I argue that Geach's heuristic explanation of almightiness does not provide a workable definition, and I propose one on his behalf. The resulting notion turns out to have precisely those theoretical virtues that Geach advertised: it is immune to the logical puzzles that bedevil omnipotence, and it is better suited to religious contexts than the notion of maximal power that informs typical definitions of omnipotence.

The Objective Relativity of Goodness

Peter Geach claims in Good and Evil that there can never be “just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so” and thereby denies that goodness can ever be used in a non-relative sense. Although his rejection of absolute goodness might initially seem to be a startling and mistaken departure from the Thomistic understanding, I argue that an examination of Thomas’s texts reveal a strong agreement between them, one grounded in a common rejection of univocal goodness. For both, “good” is relative to the nature of a being. To defend the relativity of goodness, I consider two objections: first, that relativizing goodness leads to subjectivism. Second, that divine goodness is absolute and non-relative. In answering these objections, I show that in both Thomas’s medieval and Geach’s modern accounts “good” is an analogical perfection relative to a nature. In this way, then, goodness is objectively relative.

Pointers

Reference can fail in a way that intentionality cannot. Though the stream of phenomenal experience typically does not fail to target (be about, refer to) objects outside, it may do. How does the mind go about targeting objects beyond itself? The speculative conjecture of this paper is that it does so by a type of process which can be called pointing, and that the acts or act-aspects of pointing can be called pointers. The notion of a pointer has several suggestive roots. One is the familiar physical gesture of pointing. Another is the existence of directional signs such as on roads. The third is the software data types making direct reference to memory locations in computers, also called ‘pointers’. A final source is demonstrative pronouns and other deictic expressions in language, of which Peter Geach wrote, “a demonstrative pronoun … works like a pointer, not like a label”. I suggest that there is in the mental cognitive repertoire a structurally and semantically analogous type of act which pierces the passivity of perception, directs us outside the machine, and prepares the way for drawing others’ minds to the same thing.

Geach and Ascriptivism: Beside the Point

<p><br />This paper discusses the first incarnation of what came to be known as the “Frege-Geach” point. The point was made by Peter Geach in his 1960 essay “Ascriptivism”, and developed in “Assertion”, a 1965 piece. Geach’s articles launch a wholesale attack on theories of non-descriptive performances advanced by “some Oxford philosophers” whom he accuses of ignoring “the distinction between calling a thing ‘P’ and predicating ‘P’ of a thing”. One view that Geach specifically targets is H. L. A. Hart’s claim (in the 1949 essay “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights”) that sentences of the form “X φ-ed” are not primarily descriptive but ascriptive of responsibility for actions. Hart explicitly accepted Geach’s criticism, and disowned his essay. I argue that he was wrong to do so. Perhaps the essay was worth retracting, but not because of Geach’s objections. I begin by restating and refining Geach’s arguments, in order to bring out the flaw he claimed to have detected in the “pattern of philosophising” that he took Hart’s essay to exemplify. I go on to argue that Geach’s original point poses no obstacle either to non-descriptivism in general, or to Hart’s sui generis non-descriptivist claim in particular.</p>