I was pleased to hear from Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence this morning. He inquired:
About four or five years ago you wrote about an American writer and thinker, perhaps an academic philosopher, who published, I believe, two books and seemed to disappear. You had difficulty finding information about him online. I believe you said he had an interest in East Asian thought. His “career” was eccentric by conventional standards and he seemed to be something of a loner.
Then I remembered a post of mine which begins:
This post examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking, so if anyone knows what became of him, please let me know. The Philosopher's Index shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986.)
I don't know whether Potter is the man Kurp had in mind, but the former does satisfy part of Kurp's description. In any event, the Richard Potter story is an interesting one.
I recall talking to him, briefly, in the summer of 1981 at Brown University. I was a participant in Roderick Chisholm's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, and Potter, who I believe had recently completed his Ph.D. at Brown, sat in on a few sessions. My impression was he that he was unable to secure a teaching position. I also recall a slightly derogatory comment I made about the Midwest and how one might have to go there to find employment. Potter's mild-mannered reply was to the effect that he preferred the Midwest over other geographical regions. His name stuck in my mind probably because of a paper on the paradox of analysis he co-authored with Chisholm and because of the F & P article mentioned above. See here. But then he dropped out of philosophical sight.
A few years back, I did a search and he turned up again as a George Reeves and Superman aficionado. So here is part of the rest of the Potter story. Here is Potter's George Reeves site.
A checkered career, his.
I too enjoyed the Superman series while growing up in the '50s. Some thoughts of mine on George Reeves are in Superman: The Moral of the Story.
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