George Wilson, philosophy professor who focused on film, language and action

George Wilson, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, died earlier this year. He was 81.

Wilson was one of the first philosophers to give cinema serious critical attention, producing influential books and essays on the subject.

“In his hands, philosophy of film considers both what sort of aesthetic object a film is and the bearing that films, and reflection on our experience of films, might have on broader philosophical issues,” says Robert Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. “He was committed to demonstrating what he wanted to say about film by offering rich, sensitive, often radically revisionary readings of individual films, especially ones from Hollywood’s Golden Age.”

A path to philosophy

Wilson was born Nov. 6, 1942, in La Grande, Ore., and grew up in Medford, near the state’s southern border, and Portland, in the north. He was raised with two brothers, Mark Wilson, who is now distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and Dan Wilson, a computer science professor at Southern Oregon University, who predeceased him. His father, George Wilson Sr., owned a small paper mill company and his mother, Kathleen Wilson, was a teacher and homemaker.

George Wilson was a prankster as a teen, once driving around town while a friend posed as a body in the trunk of the car to the alarm of passersby. After high school, he hitchhiked across the country in the spirit of the writer and vagabond Jack Kerouac, thinking to become a beat poet. After enrolling the University of Kansas, however, he found a life-long passion in philosophy.

He completed his bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1964 and then a PhD in philosophy at Cornell University in 1970, producing a thesis on natural numbers. He taught first at the University of Pittsburgh before joining Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for 28 years.

From 1994 to 1995, he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center. He moved to the University of California, Davis in 2000. He joined the philosophy department at USC Dornsife in 2005, drawn partly by the university’s robust cinema school. From 2008 to 2009, he was a fellow at the Council for Humanities at Princeton. He retired as an emeritus professor from USC Dornsife in 2012.

Wilson worked initially on philosophy related to human action and language. His first book, The Intentionality of Human Action, was published in 1980 and explored the knowledge individuals have of their own actions. He also contributed to interpretations of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein via a series of essays in response to the writings of American philosopher Saul Kripke.

A cinematic point of view

Wilson’s shift into film studies began when he was asked to teach a course in cinema, despite having no formal training, says his son, Gareth Wilson. Starting in the late 1970s, Wilson also began publishing essays on films. These were eventually collected in the book Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View, published in 1986. Using classic Hollywood films such as Rebel Without a Cause and North by Northwest, Wilson explored how films limit their characters’ perceptions of reality and, thus, those of the viewers.

In his 2011 book, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies, Wilson examined what exactly viewers are “seeing” when they watch a film. Moviegoers watch as a story unfolds in a fictional universe, yet this universe does not usually acknowledge the presence of the camera, despite the use of cuts, edits and other cinematic devices that manipulate our viewing. So, how do our imaginations reconcile this tension? Wilson argued for a distinction between what a film shows holistically and what the camera itself depicts.

Wilson’s enthusiasm for films ranged from high to low, from Jean Renoir to Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes cartoons, says his son. He’d often provide the family with thought experiments at the dinner table that fused film and philosophy. “One I remember particularly was his take on Theseus’s Paradox, but about the Tin Woodman of Oz: When did he cease to be the Woodman and become the Tin Man?” says Gareth.

His students often kept in touch after graduation, including Sam Shpall, a senior lecturer in philosophy at The University of Sydney who received his PhD in philosophy from USC Dornsife in 2011.

“He showed me through his teaching, writing and conversation that I could do serious philosophy about the film and literature that moved and challenged me. I will always appreciate the way he treated me like an intellectual equal (which I most certainly was not) and remember his wry affectionate smile,” says Shpall.

Wilson is survived by Karen Wilson, his wife of 48 years, his son Gareth and his daughter Flannery Wilson.