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4 books match the query 'Santayana, George'

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 George Santayana - American Writers 100: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers

George Santayana - American Writers 100

University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers

Newton P. Stallknecht

University of Minnesota Press, 1971

George Santayana - American Writers 100 was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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cover of Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana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Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana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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cover of Thinking in the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency

Thinking in the Ruins

Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency

Michael P. Hodges

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000

While Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and George Santayana (1863-1952) may never have met or even have studied one another's work, they experienced similar cultural conditions and their thinking took similar shapes. Yet, until now, their respective bodies of work have been examined separately and in isolation from one another.

Santayana is often regarded as an aesthetician and metaphysician, but Wittgenstein's work is usually seen as antithetical to the philosophical approaches favored by Santayana. In this insightful new study, Michael Hodges and John Lachs argue that behind the striking differences in philosophical style and vocabulary there is a surprising agreement in position. The similarities have largely gone unnoticed because of their divergent styles, different metaphilosophies, and separate spheres of influence. Hodges and Lachs show that Santayana's and Wittgenstein's works express their philosophical responses to contingency. Surprisingly, both thinkers turn to the integrity of human practices to establish a viable philosophical understanding of the human condition.

Both of these important twentieth-century philosophers formed their mature views at a time when the comfortable certainties of Western civilization were crumbling all around them. What they say is similar at least in part because they wished to resist the spread of ruin by relying on the calm sanity of our linguistic and other practices. According to both, it is not living human knowledge but a mistaken philosophical tradition that demands foundations and thus creates intellectual homelessness and displacement. Both thought that, to get our house in order, we have to rethink our social, religious, philosophical, and moral practices outside the context of the search for certainty. This insight and the projects that flowed from it define their philosophical kinship.

Thinking in the Ruins will enhance our understanding of these monumental thinkers' intellectual accomplishments and show how each influenced subsequent American philosophers. The book also serves as a call to philosophers to look beyond traditional classifications to the substance of philosophical thought.
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