Thursday, February 19, 2009

G*** B*** update

Here are the candidates:

George Bartlett (Florida)
George Barton (Tulane)
George Beiswanger (George State)
Gustav Bergmann (Iowa)
George Burch (Tufts)
Gary Brodsky (Connecticut)
Geoffrey Bridges (San Luis Rey)
George Boas

Thanks to an anonymous poster for looking this up (on JSTOR).

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good. I was hoping George Bealer wasn't on that list. I really like him, and I couldn't imagine him doing anything like that.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure exactly how old Bealer is, but I'm pretty sure this is before his time. At the very least, he wouldn't've yet had the standing in the profession to pull off a stunt like this.

Anonymous said...

You sure it wasn't George Berkeley?

Anonymous said...

You forgot another G.B.:

George W. Bush wrote a scholarly piece once in "Highlights" magazine, next to the Goofus and Gallant comic. The paper was brief but extremely insightful...something about the intersection among Heiddeger, the physics of time, and existence as a predicate. Or maybe it was about eating dirt...I forget...

Anonymous said...

A bunch of nobodies except for Bergman; ergo it must be him!

Anonymous said...

Do you think anyone is really going to gossip about Leiter, unless to say something really nice about him?

Anonymous said...

I'm sure there's something near a consensus. Didn't this all end a long time ago? I don't think it's a good idea to bring it back up, it just turned sad at a certain point and it might be best if we just left certain people alone. It is quite possible that this involved an unwell person.

JQS

Anonymous said...

Couldn't G*** B*** just be short for "Goddamn Bastard"? What is your evidence that the author of the article solely has in mind a person with those initials?

Anonymous said...

Anon 9:45,

The evidence is that that is the usual practice of not naming someone (though perhaps providing enough information that someone may play this sort of guessing game). If the author had intended what you suggest, usually they'd just write what you wrote, or something approximating it. Of course, your option is a possibility, but, come on, the way it was written means most likely that this was the persons initials.

However, there is a small wrinkle in my interpretation. Author wrote G***B*** instead of the usual way of writing initial: "G.B."