I was saddened to hear about George’s death. My relationship with George was formative in my philosophical development. I left my undergraduate program with a deep sense of dissatisfaction with much of philosophy – though I could not put my finger on what I found dissatisfying. Too much seemed to be trapped within the confines of modal analysis; a philosopher would propose initially plausible necessary and conditions for a phenomenon, and another would suggest a hypothetical counterexample. Rinse and repeat. George helped me identify what I found so troubling about this methodology. More than that, he pointed me towards the questions that continue to captivate me to this day.

Graduate seminars with George were marathons. He had no concept of time within these classes: they would continue as long as there was more to do. (And this is philosophy, after all…there’s always more to do). More than that, his classes were hard. There was a joke among graduate students that his undergraduate courses were comprehensible by PhD students, his graduate courses were comprehensible by professors, and his colloquia were comprehensible by no one at all. As time went on, I came to recognize that this difficulty reflected a deep respect for his students. He believed that we were capable of tackling novel formalisms, intractable puzzles and subtle arguments – and structured his classes accordingly.

After I finished coursework, George emailed me to ask for reading recommendations for a seminar he was teaching on grounding. I sent him a list of papers I took to be reasonable, and decided to audit the course in my spare time. On the first day, I was somewhat surprised to find that he had simply copied and pasted the list that I sent him into the syllabus (not even the formatting had changed!). It was no matter; the papers might have provided useful background for students in the class, but they did not guide the discussion in any meaningful sense. George did not teach in the standard way: by analyzing a paper and identifying its strengths and weaknesses. Rather, he began with a puzzle, and reasoned with students into how it ought to be resolved.

My impression is that this independence also affected George’s scholarship. This is not to say that he was ignorant of work done in the field – far from it. Nor is it to say that his work was unappreciated by others (his book Quality and Concept foreshadowed much of the debate on propositional granularity occurring today). But he was not someone who was moved by what was considered fashionable. He would write about a topic because he found it interesting and important – and would not give thought to whether others thought it was timely. In this sense, he was driven not so much by professional ambition, but by a need to figure out the answers to philosophical puzzles that intrigued him.

I thank George for his insights, guidance, and patience. I will forever admire his clarity and precision of argumentation (though I’ll give his tolerance of nonclassical logic a pass). More than that, I express my gratitude to George for the role he played in shaping my philosophical views. He will be missed.

I am not a philosopher but I knew George through his partner, who is also a wonderful and thoughtful person. At the very start of my career, as I pursued a tenure track role, George insisted one night over margaritas that if I received an offer I absolutely must negotiate, and offered some guidance on what to negotiate for and how. I got the interview, I negotiated (it shocked some people), it worked, and I was grateful every day of my 23 years in that job that I had done so. “Always negotiate” is a lesson I have passed on to many others with the same insistence. He touched many lives and made them better. I am grateful to have known him. May he rest in peace.

I was thinking of writing up something about George, and I may still. But I hadn’t seen him for a number of years and really just find myself too sad to really do it. Below is how I started:

Among the graduate students at CU-Boulder in the 90s, George’s writing process was mythical. As his R.A., I would come to his home office, and we would sit down in front of the computer to clean and edit the material he had written in the interim. I recall the first time he pulled up one of his papers for editing: Virtually every sentence of the manuscript had multiple versions, bracketed alternative wording, formulations currently in disfavor put in 5 point font, and at the end of the paper a bold section labeled “JUNK” in which discarded material was preserved for later retrieval in the event that something important had been removed. On top of this, every paper was saved as a new draft every time it was opened. As his R.A. I was tasked with helping him to choose between this bewildering array of options. At first, I would dutifully read through the various choices, reading (as an editor might) for style and clarity, and then offer an opinion, “I like this third version”. Such suggestions were invariably met with a detailed discussion of the philosophical merits and demerits of each choice. I soon learned that everything in George’s writings – every parenthetical, every comma – is there for a reason.
And those writings represent an impressive and systematic body of work that is both technically rigorous and philosophically creative. 

I first met George after a department colloquium right as I was starting grad school. Chad Carmichael and I had come to Boulder to work with George and were eager to meet him, but he was deep in conversation with a mathematician, Jan Mycielski. After waiting maybe a half-hour, we finally worked up the courage to butt in and introduce ourselves. George was so gracious, trying to catch us up to speed so we could join in the conversation, something about singletons. I asked what a singleton was and, again, George was so gracious, explaining it and making sure I didn’t feel embarrassed for asking, as Mycielski bellowed at us: “He’s a graduate student and he doesn’t know what’s singleton???”
 
Marc Moffett did such an eloquent job capturing the experience of RAing for George. What Marc didn’t mention is that we did this for about 15 hours a week, a real apprenticeship. And every day it started in the kitchen, with what his partner Keith lovingly called “the one-hour big to-do”, which consisted of George pouring a bowl of cereal, slicing up an apple, and maybe making some toast or Morningstar sausages. Which somehow took an hour.
 
You had to be patient with George. I remember sending him a draft of a dissertation chapter, and after waiting a long time for him to get to it, he had me come over to discuss it, for seven hours. The first three hours were a preamble, in preparation for actually talking about the paper. 
 
George’s questions in colloquia had preambles too. They often began by trying to talk the speaker out of something. Not something that the speaker had actually said, but rather something George suspected they might say in response to the objection he was building up to, and George wouldn’t always come right out and say what it was he was trying to talk them out of. He would eventually get to the objection, if the speaker let him get through the preamble uninterrupted, which didn’t always happen.
 
One day when I arrived for my RA work, I found George sitting on the stairs, head in his hands. He hadn’t slept. He had realized in the middle of the night that the objection to direct reference theory that he had been developing in seminar actually arises for all theories of meaning, including his theory of simple concepts. The paradox was not solved that day and no work was done. There was, however, a one-hour big to-do.
 
I keep thinking about how George would laugh when he heard something that really tickled him. It was like a string of gasps, with a look of absolute boyish delight on his face.
 
He’s with the Forms now. Rest in peace, George.

This is very sad news. George was sui generis. A brilliant mind, wrapped in a personality that was sweet, often tender, though also intense; charmingly naïve, yet unusually self-aware; and definitely complex.

When talking philosophy, George’s eyes would get big and he’d sometimes start to bounce a bit. Even over the phone a sense of quiet excitement was palpable. It was about an hour or two into one call — they were always long, and this time we were discussing something in metaphysics, I can’t recall exactly what, but it was even more abstract than usual — when he paused: “Feel that?” he asked, “We’re soaring.”

Over several decades George made significant contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. To name just a few of my favorites: “The Philosophical Limits of Scientific Essentialism,” “The Incoherence of Empiricism,” “Self-Consciousness,” “Universals,” “A Theory of Concepts and Concept Possession,” and of course Quality and Concept. George’s writings are not piecemeal interventions, but rigorous and creative developments of a grand philosophical vision. Those who’ve not yet read his work are in for a treat (and challenge!) when they do.

I myself learned a ton from George, and am deeply grateful to him for this (among other things). He was on the faculty at UT the year I applied, but left for Yale just before my arrival. Yet, thanks to Marc and Dan, who helped connect us, I wound up spending a big chunk of my graduate career working closely with George as his RA. Along the way we became friends, and were even housemates at several junctures, in Burlington and later at the house in East Haven Alex mentioned. Both places were on the water, as George did indeed love to swim.

Being George’s RA was a revelation. He was scrupulous, unwilling (and unable!) to leave a stone unturned. Marc’s description nicely captures a big part of the writing/editing process; there were also lengthy conversations away from the screen. George’s stamina was incredible: sometimes we’d spend 8+ hours in a single stretch (yes, we’d often both forget to break for lunch — or dinner, as George’s insomnia regularly forced a late start) discussing just one point, perhaps a sentence or a brief clause, though the stated task was to complete one of the books in progress (which unfortunately, along with numerous papers, remain unfinished). He’d always start somewhere else — usually with a bit of history, perhaps some comments on Frege, or Kant, or Hume, or Aristotle, or the lot — and only after a slow series of twists and turns would it emerge, typically with great force, what the issue was and why it was so significant. And difficult. Everyone says philosophy is hard. With George, you felt it. The whole of philosophy — its entire history, plus every one of its subfields — was germane to whatever detail, however small it seemed, that you were trying to get right. And there were no shortcuts; no easy outs; no convenient simplifications. He forbade “cheating” (as he called it): anything that seemed even a bit off was illegitimate, and the search continued. George was warm and had a great sense of humor, including when doing philosophy. But philosophy to him was not a game, a set of puzzles: the stakes and standards were enormously high, while the effort to meet them adequately required hard work and patience — lots and lots of both. “We’ve only been doing this for a few thousand years,” he’d say. And then together you’d begin slowly scrutinizing something, just a pebble, spending all afternoon carefully probing it from every angle, and you’d come away with a sense that you’d discovered things. Not “moves” (again, philosophy is not a game) but genuine findings. It was a taste of progress, however small, and you could see how the process might eventually, if carried off properly, lead to a much bigger prize. So, alongside the felt difficulty, with George there was always a feeling of optimism: the impression that it’s possible to get to the bottom of things — provided, of course, that we don’t rush it. George’s deep respect for philosophy was matched only by his deep faith in us, the community of philosophers: “I believe that, collectively, over historical time, undertaking philosophy as a civilization-wide project, we can obtain authoritative answers to a wide variety of central philosophical questions.”

I feel exceptionally lucky to have known George, and will miss him dearly.

I was extremely fond of George. I learnt from him the difference between the US and the UK use of ‘quite’—I suppose around 1990. I was at that time a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. George had come to my room and wanted to discuss my paper ‘The Weather Watchers’ (it became a chapter of Mental Reality, 1994). He told me that he thought it was quite good, and my heart sank, for in UK English this meant that it was not really very good, and that there was a lot wrong with it. He then went up to my whiteboard and started sketching some alternatives. I was too gloomy to listen properly, but it gradually emerged that he was enthusiastic about it.

(In UK English ‘quite’ functions as an intensifier only in front of ‘strong’ adjectives like brilliant, horrible, appalling, magnificent, superb, disgusting.)