George Santayana

From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve. Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell. Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism. John McCormick is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University, and an honorary fellow of English and other literatures at the University of York, England. He is the author of Seagoing: Memoirs, Bullfighting: Art, Technique, and Spanish Society, Fiction as Knowledge, American and European Literary Imagination, and Catastrophe and Imagination: English and American Writings from 1870 to 1950, all published by Transaction.

Detailed presentation of American philosopher's pragmatic concept of epistemology, isolation of realms of existents and subsistents. Chapters include "There is No First Principle of Criticism," "Dogma and Doubt," and "The Discovery of Essence."

“I am no specialist in the study of Lucretius; I am not a Dante scholar nor a Goethe scholar….My excuse for writing about them, notwithstanding, is merely the human excuse which every new poet has for writing about the spring. They have attracted me; they have moved me to reflection; they have revealed to me certain aspects of nature and of philosophy which I am prompted by mere sincerity to express, if anybody seems interested or willing to listen.” The modesty exhibited in the above disclaimer—from Santayana’s preface to Three Philosophical Poets—should be viewed in the context of the author’s extraordinary impact as a philosopher and teacher. The Sense of Beauty has claim to being the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; the multivolume The Life of Reason is arguably the first extended analysis of pragmatism anywhere. Among Santayana’s many well-known Harvard students, Wallace Stevens has acknowledged a clear debt to his work. Based on a course Santayana taught at Harvard, Three Philosophical Poets was first delivered to the public as a series of lectures at Columbia University in 1910. Santayana’s lifelong, learned meditation on the relationship between philosophy and art is apparent. (Santayana’s own prose style has long been considered among the most eloquent in all of philosophy.) Here, he discusses the chief phases of European philosophy—naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism—as they are set forth and epitomized by the works of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, respectively. Praise for Three Philosophical Poets and its author “[A] brilliant and admirable little book.” —T. S. Eliot “The exquisite and memorable way in which he has always said things has given so much delight that we accept what he says as we accept our own civilization. His pages are part of the douceur de vivre.” —Wallace Stevens “Santayana was the real excitement for me at Harvard, especially Three PhilosophicalPoets….It really fixed my view of what poetry should ultimately be.” —Conrad Aiken

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The first comprehensive study of Santayana’s political thought as connected to his cultural criticism. It ranges over topics such as Santayana’s political ontology, his criticism of democracy, liberalism, and communism, his views on freedom and forms of human servitude.