Winds Of Doctrine Critical Edition Volume 9

A critical edition of a classic work by the renowned philosopher George Santayana evaluating key movements in American intellectual history. Winds of Doctrine presents six essays by the internationally recognized critic and philosopher George Santayana. The essays, edited by David E. Spiech, Martin A. Coleman, and Faedra Lazar Weiss, and introduced by Paul Forster, address the broad sweep of intellectual trends—or, as the title suggests, the ever-changing winds of thought—of the Spanish-born American thinker’s time. The topics range from the secularization of American culture to the rise of religious modernism to the “genteel tradition” in American philosophy, the subject of Santayana’s final lecture in America and perhaps his best known essay. The original Winds of Doctrine, published in 1913, was the first book published after Santayana’s 1912 departure for Europe. Santayana had felt stifled at Harvard for some time, and his long-contemplated resignation from academia released him from previous obligations and allowed him a new freedom to think and write. Much later, Santayana remarked on the significance of that choice to step away: “In Winds of Doctrine and my subsequent books, a reader of my earlier writings may notice a certain change of climate. . . . It was not my technical philosophy that was principally affected, but rather the meaning and status of philosophy for my inner man.” An insightful document of American intellectual history, supplemented with annotations and rich textual commentary, Winds of Doctrine is a vital and engaging survey of the religious, political, philosophical, and literary trends of the twentieth century.

The third of five books in one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Santayana's Life of Reason, published in five books from 1905 to 1906, ranks as one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Acknowledging the natural material bases of human life, Santayana traces the development of the human capacity for appreciating and cultivating the ideal. It is a capacity he exhibits as he articulates a continuity running through animal impulse, practical intelligence, and ideal harmony in reason, society, art, religion, and science. The work is an exquisitely rendered vision of human life lived sanely. In this third book, Santayana offers a naturalistic interpretation of religion. He believes that religion is ignoble if regarded as a truthful depiction of real beings and events; but regarded as poetry, it might be the greatest source of wisdom. Santayana analyzes four characteristic religious concerns: piety, spirituality, charity, and immortality. He is at his most profound in his discussion of immortality, arguing for an ideal immortality that does not eradicate the fear of death but offers a way for mortal man to share in immortal things and live in a manner that will bestow on his successors the imprint of his soul. This critical edition, volume VII of The Works of George Santayana, includes notes, textual commentary, lists of variants and emendations, bibliography, and other tools useful to Santayana scholars. The other four books of the volume include Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science.

The Southern Baptist Convention has been torn by internal strife since 1979. This book traces the origins of Southern Baptist theology to its roots in seventeenth-century England, then turns its attention to the backgrounds of two forces which have embroiled the convention in controversy: fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy. The author identifies the doctrinal stances which divide the two camps and suggests what the future may hold in the light of the dissension.

Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive analysis of his complete œuvre, however, reveals something else entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a conservative without political commitment, but, if one respects his own language, one discerns an astonishing, little-known Santayana, whose philosophical leitmotif consists in: 1) detecting the numerous “false steps,” logical and moral, supplied by the imagination when it confuses things with the names that designate them, or the world with the feelings that it provokes in the human animal—these errors assume diverse faces: pantheism, moralism, egotism, subjectivism, transcendentalism, Platonism, Puritanism, and utopianism; 2) avoiding these illusions in such a way as to keep the spiritual door open as a form of life to be lived out in an honest fashion; 3) recognizing the natural origin of these temptations and asking oneself what moves humans to succumb imperceptibly to these mistakes, at times tragic, at others comical, and what precautions one can take to remain cognizant of the deceitful leaps that can hijack one’s life; and 4) proposing as an alternative the radical distinction between essence and existence, which leads him to distinguish four realms of being: the realm of essence, the realm of matter, the realm of truth, and the realm of spirit. Essence as logical identity, matter as contingent existence, truth as frozen history, and spirit as the flames that part from contingency and approximate the eternal. An attempt has been made in this book to expand on and clarify these questions.

Since the first selection of George Santayana's letters was published in 1955, shortly after his death, many more letters have been located. "The Works of George Santayana, Volume V", brings together a total of more than 3000 letters.