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In Memoriam: George M. Wilson (1942-2024)

Brian Leiter

Professor Wilson, who was emeritus at the University of Southern California (and taught for many years before that at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Davis), was well-known for work in philosophy of action, philosophy of language, and philosophy of film.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Wilson or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.  Please feel free to post links to obituaries and memorial notices as well.

(Thanks to his brother, the philosopher Mark Wilson, for the information.)

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17 responses to “In Memoriam: George M. Wilson (1942-2024)”

  1. John Martin Fischer

    George Wilson wrote a not-widely-known, and very much underappreciated, book on action theory. I really liked it. It had a very impressive and, to me, helpful early articulation of some aspects of control by feedback loops, etc. in human action. Also, he did important work in aesthetics, primarily in the philosophy of narrativity.

    I did not know him well, but I once had the pleasure of having dinner with him. It made me wish I had known him better.

    Reply
  2. Allen Hazen

    I met George Wilson in 1969, when I was a beginning graduate student and he was a junior faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, and remember him as a genuinely nice, gentle, human being.
    Many years later I discovered his Ph.D. thesis ("The Nature of the Natural Numbers," Cornell, 1972(*): not sure who the official supervisor was, but the acknowledgments mention Max Black and Arthur Fine). It attempted to answer "Benacerraf's first problem" (the issue raised in "What numbers could not be") in the context of an account of numerical language. (For those who don't remember: Cornell, in the 1960s and 1970s, was perhaps the most Wittgensteinian of the leading American philosophy departments.) … I don't think I was convinced by its main conclusions, but I thought — think — it was an impressive piece of philosophical work, both in content and in presentation, and repeatedly recommended it to students at a university where the library had a University Microfilms copy. Max Black had apparently thought it was a candidate for inclusion in the Cornell University Press "Contemporary Philosophy" series, but George (who was always modest about his own philosophical work) never, as far as I know, tried to publish it. Somebody should try to rescue it now and make it available: preferably in a light blue cover!
    —
    (*). The philosophy job market really wasn't as bad in the late 1960s as it has been since: people could get tenure track jobs at first-rate departments before completion their doctorates!

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  3. Daniel Callcut

    George was a brilliant philosopher and a wonderful human being. I took numerous courses with him at Johns Hopkins, including on action theory and on Kripke’s Wittgenstein. His teaching, like his writing, was often subtle and meticulous. The thoughts and ideas assembled in the early part of the action theory seminar, for instance, rewarded you in quite a profound way if you put the work in with George throughout. (I remember at the end of the seminar thinking: “Light dawns gradually over the whole!”)

    If George was elegant in philosophy, he could be scatter-brained and eccentric in person. I once remember him coming to class with shaving foam still on the side of his face. He had a great, often slightly rueful smile, and an expressive face that saw the light and dark of life.

    He could, on occasion, get riled up when talking about philosophy. I remember this, in particular, when he was defending his friend Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein. His essays in defence of Kripke’s interpretation are fine contributions to the debate, displaying much of George’s philosophical finesse.

    He was unfailingly kind to me. He also talked to me in an enjoyable and memorable way about the issue of class in philosophy. (He had figured out that my own background was working class, even if this was something that people often didn’t realise.) He told an anecdote about some time he spent with an English philosopher that he really admired. The guy was great, super impressive, and from a working class non-Oxbridge background. Then a middle-class Oxford graduate popped in to say hello, and the guy just immediately fell apart, confidence completely gone. George told the story with a sense of almost incredulity about what class can do (especially in England), and with great sensitivity and pathos.

    Many people have linked to the terrific profile of George by Leo Robson. It gives a sense of the importance of his work in the philosophy of film. Here is a link:

    https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/a-weakness-for-complexity-an-interview-with-the-philosopher-george-m-wilson

    I was really delighted to see George’s work highlighted in this way. He will be remembered with enormous fondness. I hope people unfamiliar with his work will seek it out.

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  4. Stephen Darwall

    I have wonderful memories of George, mostly like Allen H from Pittsburgh, where George was one of a wonderful group of junior faculty when I was a grad student there from 1968-1972: Joe Camp, Pamela Foa, Russ Dancy, Myles Brand, Marilyn Frye, and others. George was incredibly kind and funny, as well as being a first-rate philosopher. I definitely agree with Daniel Callcut about his expressive face and rueful smile. I can see it now.

    He had a wonderful knowledge of film. He taught an undergrad course on philosophy and film at Pitt and showed weekly films that I would go to. It kindled a life-long interest in film for me.

    I would see George regularly at convention and his later jobs–Hopkins, USC, etc. even though he had gray hair from the first time I met him when he was in his 20s, he never really seemed to age. So his death comes as a shock.

    RIP, George.

    Reply
  5. Jeffrey C. King

    George Wilson was an excellent philosopher. Early in my career, George was incredibly encouraging and supportive of me (brother Mark was on my dissertation committee and was the main influence on me in graduate school). My dissertation and first substantial publication were based on work George did in the mid 1980’s on the semantics of anaphoric pronouns and descriptions. George was my colleague twice over (U.C. Davis and USC) and my good friend. George was funny, kind and generous. He got ordained online so that he could marry me and Annie. The wedding ceremony he wrote for us was hilarious and touching. Annie and I still have a copy of it that we look at from time to time. I’ll miss George tremendously. May he rest in peace.

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  6. Richard Moran

    My great good fortune is that George was the other philosopher at the National Humanities Center in 1994-95. We had a lot of time together and became very good friends that year. I think we had met once before, at Johns Hopkins, and I knew his work on action and on film narration. He was working on Nicholas Ray then, but I don't know if he followed through on the book project. But he had video tapes of various rarities with him that he would share with me, including 'Wind Across the Everglades' with Burl Ives, and 'The Savage Innocents', a fictional movie about Inuit life with Anthony Quinn (from which comes the Bob Dylan song 'Quinn the Eskimo'). And the great James Mason movie about cortisone abuse (yes!), 'Bigger Than Life'. The deeper introduction to Nicholas Ray was only one thing I gained from that year with George. As people have noted, he was an extraordinarily warm and engaging human being, free of vanity and with a great sense of humor. We also shared interests in Wittgenstein and in the philosophy of action. His book on action is still one of the most original and distinctive studies in the analytic tradition: very Davidson influenced but still offering a very non-reductive teleological account, grounded in the logic of action sentences, adopting some of Anscombe's perspective. There's still nothing like it on the scene (although Scott Sehon's work on action can be seen as a development from it. Scott worked with George when George visited Princeton in the 80s, but that was before I got there). 1994-95 was also the year of my tenure review and it was good to be away. George was an encouraging and steadying influence during that year. And speaking of weddings (Jeff King), George and Karen were part of Borgna's and my very small wedding in Rome, after a conference there in 2000. He got me to read 'Elective Affinities', and I must still read 'The Woman in White'. He was a wonderful friend and I will miss him forever.

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  7. David Hills

    George was remarkably wise and funny and gracious and kind, despite being as richly and ruefully aware of the darker side of things as anyone I’ve ever met. I met him when interviewing at Hopkins coming out of grad school, and our conversations over the next few years welcomed me into philosophy, persuading me there could be a place in it for someone like me. George’s work in analytically demanding parts of the subject was clear, exact, and startlingly original. I never revisit his work on action or Wittgenstein without learning new things. But it is the work on film that has meant the most to me personally over the years. The first of his film books, Narration in Light, weaves together world class analytical argument about film in general with world class readings of diverse particular movies in a way that remains my personally unattainable model of how aesthetics ought to be done. I am thankful to have known him and will miss him more than I can say.

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  8. Peter Hanks

    I got to know George during a year at UC Davis. This was my first job out of grad school and George was incredibly warm and welcoming. (Big thanks to Jeff King for helping me get that job.) I taught a class on philosophy of action, which gave me the chance to read his book on action. I grew up at Berkeley and always thought that Davidson had settled the debate about action explanations. George's book really opened my eyes to the possibility of a non-causal account of reasons. HIs papers on Kripke on Wittgenstein on rules also had a huge impact and are still some of the best stuff on this topic. Many years later George wrote a tenure letter for me, for which I am forever grateful. He will be dearly missed.

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  9. John Koethe

    I want to second these remarks on what a warm and wonderful person George was, and to add to the praise of his work on film. And his work on Kripke and Wittgenstein is simply the best and clearest there is. When I was writing my book on Wittgenstein, I wanted to make clear what parts of Kripke's reading I wanted to endorse, and what part I want to reject, which was hard to do because Kripke's own presentation is unclear in parts. Without George's reconstruction of it I don't think I could have done it, and I devoted a whole section of a chapter to it.

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  10. Michael Vernon Wedin

    George was a fine philosopher and a super colleague. He brought his unusual gifts to the department at Davis and elevated the whole place. Principally, in discussion but also in person (his person). I work in ancient Greek and many times he wanted to know what I was up to. In turn I got the benefit of his philosophical wisdom, after all I was interested in how good Aristotle's point was or how cogent his argument and here George was as good an expert as any. He also read us a first version of a Kripke paper which was just superb. Hard to imagine George not being abroad in the land. But I am grateful for the gift of having known him.

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  11. Flannery Wilson

    Here is the speech that I gave as my father's eulogy:

    When I thought about writing a speech, I honestly dreaded it because I was afraid that it would make me too sad. But here I am, so I will say a few words.

    In high school, my dad always hated my boyfriends and he was right. I chose two orthodox Jewish guys who dumped me after a couple of months because I wasn’t Jewish enough. My dad was right for hating them. Even though I rebelled against him at the time, I always trusted my dad’s judgment and I knew he was right about them. I think it’s fair to say that my dad was my moral compass in many ways. I looked up to him, I viewed him as charming, and I wanted to have the same wit and charisma. I also must credit him for my love of oldies and classic movies.

    Because of my dad, in graduate school I viewed most of the readings that I was doing as bullshit. None of it had any academic rigor. I idealized the analytic tradition and tried to use it in many of my seminar papers. For example, I wrote about the Derrida/Searle debate and basically called Derrida a charlatan. I agreed with Searle on many points and sort of saw him as a stand in for my father. (Of course, we all know now that Searle was a terrible womanizer, but that doesn’t take away from the philosophy). I wanted to speak directly to my readers so that they could actually understand what I was saying. My dad taught me to be academically humble but firm, and to avoid using unnecessary jargon that would alienate people.

    Back when I was a kid, I distinctly remember my dad telling me about when his own father died. “Do you want me to be sad when you die?” I asked.

    “No,” he replied.

    At the time, figuring that I would not lose him until far into the future, I nodded and accepted his response.

    Reply
  12. Gareth Wilson

    It has been heartening to hear here, as well as on Facebook and other platforms, about the impact that my Dad has had on his colleagues and students. It means a lot to hear from those whom my dad influenced. Some of the details shared here really rang true.

    Growing up, I admired my dad so much that I studied philosophy to follow in his footsteps. Dad used to tell me and my sister philosophical thought experiments at the dinner table. One I particularly remembered was his take on Theseus's ship, but about the Tin Woodman of Oz (when did he cease to be a man and become the Tin Man?). I thought at one point of becoming a professor, but in Dad’s characteristic wisdom, he advised me to pursue something more practical due to changes in the academic landscape that were already happening over 20 years ago. I took that advice to heart.

    I was so influenced by Dad that I wanted to live in the era he grew up in—the 1950s. Some of my fondest memories are of hearing Dad’s stories about growing up. There was the time he and his friends drove around Medford, Oregon pretending to have a dead body in their trunk. They’d stop at a red light, with a friend’s arm dangling out of the trunk, limp and doused in ketchup, and take glee in the horror of the drivers around them. This culminated in someone screaming, “Hey buddy, you’ve got something sticking out of your trunk!” At which point Dad jumped out of the driver’s seat, stuffed his friend’s ketchup-stained arm in the trunk and drove off. As the story goes, they read about the dead body sighting in the news the next day.

    There was the time he beat up my Uncle Mark to the tune of "Rumble" by Link Wray—which sounds distinctly like something out of a Tarantino film. I don’t know what he meant by “beat up,” but I hope it was mostly in jest. Then there was the time he accidentally drove his car into a creek at Lover’s Lane, or when he crashed his Good Humor ice cream cart during his brief foray as an ice cream peddler. He also used to recount how he hitchhiked across the country after high school with dreams of becoming a beat poet in the vein of Jack Kerouac, before finding his true calling in analytic philosophy.

    It was hard seeing my dad’s powerful mind diminish. One of my last memories of him is watching Looney Tunes together. Before he grew tired of it—like he did with pretty much everything we put on the TV in his final years—we shared a knowing smile over "Duck Amuck." Dad loved literature, the films of Jean Renoir, and the most arcane works of Wittgenstein, but he was never above enjoying a classic cartoon. In fact, he praised the work of Chuck Jones or Carl Barks (comic book creator of Uncle Scrooge) as the highest of art, right up there with the work of all the other great auteurs he admired.

    I am thankful I had such an amazing father.

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  13. Luca Ferrero

    I was first introduced to George Wilson's work on agency by Richard Moran when I was in graduate school and later met him in person, I believe thanks to the introduction of the many friends he had at UW-Milwaukee, where I was teaching at that time. His work in the philosophy of agency had a great impact in my own philosophical development in many subtle ways, as I realize more and more every time I come back to his wonderful book 'The Intentionality of Human Action'. As John Fischer correctly remarked above, this is a very much underappreciated book, although one that is never underrated by those who have actually engaged with it.

    George was also very supportive of me and other younger scholars in the philosophy of agency at a time when the discipline was still trying to establish itself as a professionally recognized AOS, which is another way in which he helped shape the field in ways that are not be immediately visible.

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  14. Steven Gross

    Johns Hopkins has now posted a memorial notice. Here is the link:

    https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/08/28/george-m-wilson-philosophy/

    As for myself, I fondly remember George's dry wit and gravelly voice and will always be grateful for the advice and support he gave me when I was a grad student.

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  15. Kate Thomson-Jones

    I first met George at a small aesthetics conference that I organized in the mid-2000s. At the conference’s welcoming reception, I (nervously) went over to introduce myself to George. The first thing that he said to me was, ‘Ah ha! You’re my philosophical granddaughter!’ This was a playful reference to the fact that I had become interested in the philosophy of film through Berys Gaut, and Berys had become interested in the same subject through George. As my philosophical grandfather, George was a source of great inspiration and encouragement. His views on the epistemology of film are incredibly subtle; as I continue to think about them, I will sorely miss having George to talk to.

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  16. Gregory Currie

    I remember George as a kind and thoughtful friend, a wonderful speaker and as someone who convinced me that a view of film spectatorship which seemed to me initially as bonkers might actually be right.

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  17. Susan White

    (1/17/2025) I have belatedly learned of George's death back in August, 2024. George's impact on my life and intellectual development cannot be overstated. He was a role model, inspired teacher, and mentor from my student years at Johns Hopkins (1980-87) until well into my professorship at the University of Arizona (I retired in 2022). I was first his teaching assistant and he then directed my dissertation on the films of Max Ophuls, in whose work George first interested me. His brilliance and immense kindness inspired in me a deep sense of humility. He was gentle and nurturing of my spastic and fuzzy thinking, leading me toward more rigor (such as I obtained) and a deeper appreciation of the aesthetics and philosophy of film. I am profoundly sorry that such a gentle nature is no more. I remember his deep voice, his white hair from an early age, his sudden bursts of amusement or indignation at the derailing of my or others' thought processes, his wit, his blushing when reminded of his sense of self (he was modest to a fault), his fondness for a slice of pie in the cafeteria. Although I was not in touch with him recently, I always had him in the back of my mind. And although our relationship was only professional, I find myself experiencing his loss as if he were a parent, which in academic terms, I suppose he was. I am taken back to the loss of my mother in 2023, in that the sense of his unconditional (or slightly conditional) acceptance, his care and understanding, his continual inspiration to self-betterment being withdrawn from the world, has removed another substratum from my life. Over all these years, for all that you encompassed, George, I hardly knew ye.

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