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2 books match the query 'George Santayana'

cover of A Philosophical Novelist: George Santayana and the Last Puritan

A Philosophical Novelist

George Santayana and the Last Puritan

H. T. Kirby-Smith

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

H. T. Kirby-Smith uses Santayana’s 1936 novel, The Last Puritan, as both an occasion and a means for bringing into focus the complex relations between Santayana’s life, his personality, and his philosophy. Opening with an account of Santayana’s various literary styles and arguing for the significance of Santayana’s writing of philosophy as literature, Kirby-Smith notes that Santayana saw the rational life as a continual adjustment and accommodation of contradictory claims. And he saw a literary style as an accommodation of the author to the reader.

Chapters 2 through 5 provide the philosophical background for a consideration of The Last Puritan, summarizing exactly how Santayana assimilated other philosophies into his own.

Chapters 6 and 7 incorporate Santayana’s three-volume autobiography, his letters and memoirs, and biographical studies by others into a psychological portrait of the author. All of this is in preparation for chapters 8 and 9, which focus on The Last Puritan. Kirby-Smith closes with a chapter that serves as a legal brief in defense of the author against the harsh, sometimes malicious attacks of his critics.

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cover of Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana

Physical Order and Moral Liberty

Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana

George Santayana

Vanderbilt University Press, 1969

This book is a collection of fifty-five essays and fragments by George Santayana, from the Santayana collections of the Columbia University Library and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

Although the essay included are largely philosophical in nature, none is narrowly technical. The general reader should be able to understand most of the pieces, as well as enjoy their literary quality and profit by the insights and wisdom they provide. The philosopher may draw courage from the speculative spirit of the essays and benefit by Santayana's steadfast vision and his sensitivity to distinctions.

For the serious student of Santayana's thought, this volume will prove indispensable. It contains sustained philosophical studies of causation (the only ones by Santayana anywhere), substantial elaborations of Santayana’s ideas on the relation of sensation to thought, and reflections on the nature of freedom and the spiritual life. In addition, Santayana develops here a new theory of “critical instants” and elaborates on his ideas of the nature of consciousness and its relations to time.

Sections on the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mind are followed by groups of essays on ethics, the philosophy of politics, and the freedom of mind—in which, according to Santayana, the blessing of the good life consists. The book concludes with brief notes on Bergson, Democritus, and Leibniz and a longer essay on the thought of Vaihinger.
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