George Santayana

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George Santayana

George Santayana (16 December 1863–26 September 1952), was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist, best known for the oft-quoted statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," from Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of The Life of Reason.

Santayana wrote some 18 volumes of philosophy, as well as poetry, a novel (The Last Puritan, which was a best seller in 1936), and an autobiography. His students went on to fame and glory as well. The most prominent of his students were T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Walter Lippmann and Harry Austryn Wolfson.

1 Biography
2 Philosophy
3 Selected Works
4 External links

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Biography

Santayana was born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana in Madrid, Spain, but spent his boyhood in Ávila. He moved with his parents to Boston in 1872, when he was nine years old, and took to using the name George, the English variant of Jorge. He attended Boston Latin School, and studied under William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard University. Graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied for two years in Berlin and then returned to Harvard to teach philosophy from 1889 until he retired upon gaining an inheritance in 1912. He then lived for several years in Paris and Oxford, finally settling in Rome from 1925 until his death in 1952.

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Philosophy

While not considered to be a canonical pragmatist in the mold of James, Charles Peirce, Royce, or John Dewey by many scholars, Santayana wrote what could arguably be considered the first full-length exposition of pragmatism: his early masterwork, The Life of Reason, in five volumes. In this work, Santayana develops pragmatist principles in a broad framework of naturalism, and examines metaphysics & epistemology, society, religion, art, and science, respectively. He was an early adherent to epiphenomenalism, although he also expressed admiration for the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius. Like many of the classical pragmatists, being well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to a naturalistic metaphysics, in which human cognition, practices, and institutions grew and developed to harmoniously adapt to their environment, and whose value could only be measured in proportion to their conduciveness to the attainment of human happiness.

Notably, Santayana also wrote the first major work on aesthetics to be published in America, The Sense of Beauty. While he did not subscribe to Spinoza's rationalism, the writings of Spinoza were also held in particularly high regard by Santayana. Like Spinoza, Santayana adopted a somewhat sceptical stance in his philosophy to belief in the existence of God, referring to himself as an "aesthetic Catholic".

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