George Santayana's Marginalia
George Santayana's Marginalia

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 0262016303

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A selection of Santayana's notes in the margins of other authors' works that sheds light on his thought, art, and life. In his essay "Imagination," George Santayana writes, "There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margins, may be more interesting than the text." Santayana himself was an inveterate maker of notes in the margins of his books, writing (although neatly, never scrawling) comments that illuminate, contest, or interestingly expand the author's thought. These volumes offer a selection of Santayana's marginalia, transcribed from books in his personal library. These notes give the reader an unusual perspective on Santayana's life and work. He is by turns critical (often), approving (seldom), literary slangy, frivolous, and even spiteful. The notes show his humor, his occasional outcry at a writer's folly, his concern for the niceties of English prose and the placing of Greek accent marks. These two volumes list alphabetically by author all the books extant that belonged to Santayana, reproducing a selection of his annotations intended to be of use to the reader or student of Santayana's thought, his art, and his life. Santayana, often living in solitude, spent a great deal of his time talking to, and talking back to, a wonderful miscellany of writers, from Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell. These notes document those conversations.

George Santayana at 150
George Santayana at 150

Author: Matthew C. Flamm

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-12-19

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0739183095

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Santayana at 150: International Interpretations is a collection of essays by seventeen authors celebrating the life and thought of Spanish–American philosopher George Santayana. This book appears on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Santayana’s birth. Appropriately, the authors come from both sides of the Atlantic and put forth a range of insights that demonstrate the continuing life and relevance of Santayana’s thinking. The book includes considerations of the major themes of his philosophy—materialism, naturalistic ethics, and aesthetics—and of the influence exerted on Santayana’s work by his life circumstances and geographic surroundings, especially of Rome.

Santayana the Philosopher
Santayana the Philosopher

Author: Daniel Moreno

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-03-06

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1611486564

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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.

George Santayana
George Santayana

Author: John Rodden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 1351517627

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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.

Overheard in Seville 2012
Overheard in Seville 2012

Author:

Publisher: Santayana Edition

Published: 2012-10-15

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13:

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An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on American philosophy, poet, critic, and best-selling novelist George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana Scholarship.