George M. Wilson (1942-2024)

George M. Wilson, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Southern California, has died. Professor Wilson worked in aesthetics, especially philosophy and film, as well as philosophy of action and philosophy of language. He is the author of Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (2012), Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (1988), and The Intentionality of Human Action (1980), among other works, which you can learn more about here and here. Wilson became professor of philosophy and cinematic arts at USC in 2005. Prior to that, he was at the University of California at Davis, and, for 28 years, Johns Hopkins University. His first faculty position was at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD from Cornell (with a dissertation entitled “The Nature of the Natural Numbers”) and his undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. A 2017 interview with Wilson may be of interest to readers. Here’s an excerpt: “Were you conscious of being a new sort of philosophical film critic?” …I don’t believe that I thought of myself as a new kind of philosopher of film. I would have been dubious that there was such an intellectual discipline as ‘philosophy of film.’  I don’t remember if I even knew at that time that there were senior Anglo-American philosophers who were writing on film other than Cavell. And, as much as I admired aspects of his brilliance, I didn’t think of him as conforming to the ideals and standards I cared about from my training in analytic philosophy. “How would you characterize this tradition and the mental habits it formed?” In retrospect, it is not easy to capture how I thought of ‘analytic philosophy’.  As narrow as it was reputed to be, there was a fair amount of diversity among the leading practitioners. Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Elisabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Michael Dummett all fell within the ‘analytic’ canon that I admired, but they are very different from one another. But within the ‘analytic’ paradigm, there was a great emphasis on clarity of formulation in discussion and on logical rigor in argumentation, and certainly these were ideals that influenced me enormously. As intellectually conservative as the movement seems in retrospect, I and many other..
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