A Philosophical Autobiography
By Peter Geach
In this account of my life I leave much unsaid; I am concerned with those facts and events that I see as having had a manifest influence on my career as a philosopher and with the way I came to know, in person or in their works, those philosophers who have most guided my thought.
I was born in Lower Chelsea, London, on March 29, 1916. My father, George Hender Geach, was at that time working in the Indian Educational Service; he became Professor of Philosophy at Lahore, and afterwards Principal of a training college for teachers at Peshawar. On furlough he had met and fallen in love with my mother, Eleonora Frederyka Adolfina Sgonina, the daughter of Polish emigrants: her father, a civil engineer, had rightly judged that he would prosper in England better than in his own country under the Prussian heel. My mother came back to England for my birth after a short time in India; the marriage had not been happy, and·. she never returned to my father. My earliest years were spent in Cardiff in my Polish grandparents' house; the novelist Doreen Wallace, an old friend of my mother's, told me that my grandmother never learned English well, so I must often have heard Polish spoken, though I lost all memory of the language. When I was four years old my father secured a court order, making me the ward of a Miss Tarr during his absence in India, and for me all contact with my mother and her parents ceased; Miss Tarr, a rather formidable elderly lady, had been my paternal grandfather's betrothed and the guardian of his children after his death. I remained in Miss Tarr's care until my father was once again in England, invalided out of the I.E.S.
