George Santayana's Marginalia

George Santayana's Marginalia

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 0262016303

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Letters of George Santayana: 1941-1947

The Letters of George Santayana: 1941-1947

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 0262195569

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The seventh and penultimate book of the letters of American philosopher George Santayana, covering the years 1941 to 1947 and including letters to such correspondents as Daniel Cory, John Hall Wheelock, Robert Lowell, and others. This penultimate volume of Santayana's letters chronicles Santayana's life during a difficult time--the war years and the immediate postwar period. The advent of World War II left Santayana isolated in Rome, and the difficulties of wartime travel across borders forced him to abandon plans to move to more agreeable locations in Switzerland or Spain. During these years, Santayana lived in a single room in a nursing home run by the Blue Sisters of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, where, during the winter months, he did much of his writing in bed (wearing well-mended gloves) in order to stay warm. And yet, despite wartime deprivations, illness, and old age (he was 77 in 1941), Santayana was remarkably productive, completing both his autobiography Persons and Places and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: or God in Man, and all but completing Dominations and Powers. He confided to one correspondent that he had never been more at peace or more happy. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Seven are written to such correspondents as his friend and protégée Daniel Cory, his financial manager and heir George Sturgis, and the American poet Robert Lowell. The correspondence with Lowell--which began when the younger writer sent Santayana a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle--signals an important new friendship, which became a source of affection and intellectual engagement in Santayana's final years.


George Santayana

George Santayana

Author: John Rodden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 1351517627

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Letters of George Santayana

The Letters of George Santayana

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 9780262194952

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, 1948-1952

The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, 1948-1952

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 730

ISBN-13: 0262195712

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Letters from the last years of Santayana's life, written as he completed Dominations and Powers, the final volume of his autobiography, and the one-volume abridgement of his early five-part masterwork, The Life of Reason. This final volume of Santayana's letters spans the last five years of the philosopher's life. Despite the increasing infirmities of age and illness, Santayana continued to be remarkably productive during these years, working steadily until September 1952, when he died of stomach cancer, just three months short of his eighty-ninth birthday. Still living in the nursing home run by the "Blue Sisters" of the Little Company of Mary in Rome (now with such prewar luxuries as hot baths and central heating restored), Santayana completed his book Dominations and Powers, which had been more than fifty years in the making, the final part of his autobiography Persons and Places, published posthumously in 1953 as My Host the World, and the abridgement of his early five-part masterwork, The Life of Reason, into a single volume--all while continuing to maintain a voluminous correspondence with friends and admirers. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Eight are written to such correspondents as the young American poet Robert Lowell (whom Santayana thinks of "only as a friend and not merely as a celebrity" and to whom he sends a wedding gift of $500); Ira D. Cardiff, the editor of Atoms of Thought, a collection of excerpts from Santayana's writings (which, Santayana complained, portrayed him as more akin to Tom Paine than Thomas Aquinas); Richard Colton Lyon, a young Texan who would later collect Santayana's writings about America in Santayana on America: Essays, Notes, and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy (1968); and the humanist philosopher Corliss Lamont.


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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress, critical edition, Volume 7

The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress, critical edition, Volume 7

Author: George Santayana

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0262314673

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The second of five books of 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 second book, Santayana analyzes several distinctive forms of human association, from political and economic orders to forms of friendship, to determine what possibilities they provide for the life of reason. He considers, among other topics, love and the affinity for the ideal, the family, aristocracy and democracy, the constituents of genuinely free friendship (including that of husband and wife), patriotism, and the ideal society of kindred spirits. This Critical Edition, volume VII of The Works of George Santayana, includes a chronology, notes, bibliography, textual commentary, lists of variants, and other tools useful to Santayana scholars. The other four books of the volume include Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science.