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."

George Santayana (1862-1952) of Spanish descent, and generally claimed to be in the canon of American philosophers, was substantially influenced by his Roman Catholic origins in his philosophical disposition toward the value of tradition, religious symbols and dogma. His philosophical project sustained a respectful attitude toward the spiritual value of orthodox religion while the thrust of his philosophy was naturalistic and materialistic throughout. There is a perception by some scholars that Santayana’s philosophy evolved from a humanistic perspective to a more spiritual one in his later years. It is the position of this thesis that his philosophy, at the “core” depicting a harmonious striving toward individual happiness, remained essentially consistent from his earliest publication of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion and The Life of Reason through his later works of Scepticism and Animal Faith, Realms of Being, Dominations and Powers and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. Santayana’s philosophical approach is both phenomenological and social constructionist in its methodology, significantly preempting the methodology of social constructionist theology and a post-modern interpretation of religion. His idiosyncratic phenomenological approach is compared with a “benchmark” methodology of Edmund Husserl, the generally accepted founder of the phenomenological method. There are also important similarities between Santayana’s phenomenological approach and those of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. The basis for the comparison of the phenomenological methodology of Santayana and Husserl is their mutually similar fundamental theory of intuited essence. Santayana’s contribution to religious studies is not only philosophical but also theological where he has utilized Christian theological language in transposing and interpolating his philosophy of religion to the Christian drama of the salvational Christ. Santayana’s essay “Ultimate Religion” reflects his perspective of a disillusioned but still spiritual vision incorporating the piety, discipline, and spirituality; of a life of reason. Within the framework of this “model” Santayana’s philosophy of religion is developed and explored. Finally, the relevance of Santayana’s philosophy of religion to contemporary religious studies and selected religious issues is addressed with a delineation and discussion of some important aspects of his philosophical vision.

Shattered Pictures of Places and Cities se adentra por las páginas autobiográficas, filosóficas y narrativas más relevantes de George Santayana discurriendo por sus viajes y geografías físicas en paralelo a sus viajes y geografías morales. Es un intento de ir más allá de la reflexión entorno a los orígenes biográficos del filósofo; de ahí que se recupere una indagación sobre su habitar el lenguaje y el arte. Santayana reconsidera los fundamentos del arte de la memoria clásica en su autobiografía, para formular una nueva propuesta estética donde el arte y la vida se funden y se confunden, estimulándose recíprocamente. Hila una filosofía del viaje y del lugar, donde se privilegia una noción del habitar que ilumina nuestra condición de nómadas -en la vida y en el pensamiento-, y nuestra trágica estable inestabilidad en este mundo.

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.

Knowing that we are finite, how can we live to the fullest? Philosopher George Santayana suggested 'spirituality' enables us to enjoy what we have. This book clarifies and extends Santayana's account of spirituality, while suggesting how the detachment of spirituality can relieve human suffering, enrich our lives, and make us better human beings.

“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