Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana:
Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana:

Author: Norman Henfrey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1968-09-01

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780521094634

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George Santayana (1863-1952) was one of the leading philosophers of his era. His range of interests was wide; in addition to books and essays on philosophical subjects, he wrote literary criticism of the first rank, cultural criticism that remained fresh and valid up to the time of this book's publication in 1968, and autobiographical works which reveal a man of great charm with a deep interest and affection for his acquaintances. This two-volume selection of Santayana's writing is exceptionally comprehensive; the editor has been careful to provide passages which adequately illustrate Santayana's views on a wide variety of subjects and his selection includes essays and excerpts from books that had long been unavailable. Volume 1 contains essays on literature and the theory of art, and character studies of Santayana's family and some of his most famous acquaintances, and a substantial introduction by Norman Henfrey.

Scepticism and Animal Faith
Scepticism and Animal Faith

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 1955-01-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780486202365

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In this work, Santayana analyzes the nature of the knowing process and demonstrates by means of clear, powerful arguments how we know and what validates our knowledge. The central concept of his philosophy is found in a careful discrimination between the awareness of objects independent of our perception and the awareness of essences attributed to objects by our mind, or between what Santayana calls the realm of existents and the realm of subsistents. Since we can never be certain that these attributes actually inhere in a substratum of existents, skepticism is established as a form of belief, but animal faith is shown to be a necessary quality of the human mind. Without this faith there could be no rational approach to the necessary problem of understanding and surviving in this world. Santayana derives this practical philosophy from a wide and fascinating variety of sources. He considers critically the positions of such philosophers as Descartes, Euclid, Hume, Kant, Parmenides, Plato, Pythagoras, Schopenhauer, and the Buddhist school as well as the assumptions made by the ordinary man in everyday situations. Such matters as the nature of belief, the rejection of classical idealism, the nature of intuition and memory, symbols and myth, mathematical reality, literary psychology, the discovery of essence, sublimation of animal faith, the implied being of truth, and many others are given detailed analyses in individual chapters.

George Santayana
George Santayana

Author: Newton Phelps Stallknecht

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 49

ISBN-13: 1452910111

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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.

The Essential Santayana
The Essential Santayana

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0253221056

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Although he was born in Spain, George Santayana (1863-1952) became a uniquely American philosopher, critic, poet, and best-selling novelist. Along with his Harvard colleagues William James and Josiah Royce, he is best known as one of the founders of American pragmatism and recognized for his insights into the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. The Essential Santayana presents a selection of Santayana's most important and influential literary and philosophical work. Martin A. Coleman's critical introduction sets Santayana into the American philosophical tradition and provides context for contemporary readers, many of whom may be approaching Santayana's writings for the first time. This landmark collection reveals the intellectual and literary diversity of one of American philosophy's most lively minds.

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.