Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana’s renowned work of moral philosophy outlines his vision of the ideal life. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana’s The Life of Reason stands as one of the most influential and beautifully written works of philosophical naturalism. In it, Santayana articulates his vision of human progression from chaos to reason and the pursuit of the ideal life. Focusing his thought on the lived experiences of people, these phases are traced through humanity’s many endeavors, including art, science, politics, religion, friendship, and reason. Drawing on a range of influences, from Democritus and Aristotle to Spinoza and Schopenhauer, Santayana develops a materialist system of thought that stresses the importance of imagination and spiritual experience. Originally published in five volumes, from 1905 to 1906, The Life of Reason is Santayana’s most complete statement of moral philosophy and an inspiring account of human dignity. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Download or read book George Santayana s Philosophy of Religion written by Edward W. Lovely and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana (1862-1952) of Spanish descent, and generally claimed to be in the canon of American philosophers, was substantially influenced by his Roman Catholic origins in his philosophical disposition toward the value of tradition, religious symbols and dogma. His philosophical project sustained a respectful attitude toward the spiritual value of orthodox religion while the thrust of his philosophy was naturalistic and materialistic throughout. There is a perception by some scholars that Santayana's philosophy evolved from a humanistic perspective to a more spiritual one in his later years. It is the position of this thesis that his philosophy, at the "core" depicting a harmonious striving toward individual happiness, remained essentially consistent from his earliest publication of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion and The Life of Reason through his later works of Scepticism and Animal Faith, Realms of Being, Dominations and Powers and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. Santayana's philosophical approach is both phenomenological and social constructionist in its methodology, significantly preempting the methodology of social constructionist theology and a post-modern interpretation of religion. His idiosyncratic phenomenological approach is compared with a "benchmark" methodology of Edmund Husserl, the generally accepted founder of the phenomenological method. There are also important similarities between Santayana's phenomenological approach and those of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. The basis for the comparison of the phenomenological methodology of Santayana and Husserl is their mutually similar fundamental theory of intuited essence. Santayana's contribution to religious studies is not only philosophical but also theological where he has utilized Christian theological language in transposing and interpolating his philosophy of religion to the Christian drama of the salvational Christ. Santayana's essay "Ultimate Religion" reflects his perspective of a disillusioned but still spiritual vision incorporating the piety, discipline, and spirituality; of a life of reason. Within the framework of this "model" Santayana's philosophy of religion is developed and explored. Finally, the relevance of Santayana's philosophy of religion to contemporary religious studies and selected religious issues is addressed with a delineation and discussion of some important aspects of his philosophical vision.
Download or read book The Letters of George Santayana 1941 1947 written by George Santayana and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Three Philosophical Poets written by George Santayana and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University. This book was released on 1910 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scepticism and Animal Faith written by George Santayana and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailed presentation of American philosopher's pragmatic concept of epistemology, isolation of realms of existents and subsistents. Chapters include "There is No First Principle of Criticism," "Dogma and Doubt," and "The Discovery of Essence."
Download or read book Santayana the Philosopher written by Daniel Moreno and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book George Santayana Ppr written by and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. John McCormick is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University, and an honorary fellow of English and other literatures at the University of York, England. He is the author of Seagoing: Memoirs, Bullfighting: Art, Technique, and Spanish Society, Fiction as Knowledge, American and European Literary Imagination, and Catastrophe and Imagination: English and American Writings from 1870 to 1950, all published by Transaction.
Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 first book of the work, Santayana provides an account of how the human animal develops instinct, passion, and chaotic experience into rationality and ideal life. Inspired by Aristotle's De Anima, Darwin's evolutionary theory, and William James's The Principles of Psychology, Santayana contends that the requirements of action in a hazardous and uncertain environment are the sources of the development of mind. More specifically, instinct and imagination are crucial to the emergence of reason from chaos. Separating himself from the typical thought of the time by his recognition of the imagination, Santayana in this volume offers extensive critiques of various philosophies of mind, including those of Kant and the British empiricists. 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.
Download or read book Character and Opinion in the United States written by George Santayana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers. Because of his broad-ranging interests and lack of any permanent home in one particular country, he has often been stereotyped as a meditative philosopher removed from the world, living in what he himself called the "realm of spirit" among eternal essences. While there is some truth in this characterization, it is also true that Santayana was a penetrating analyst and critic of contemporary societies.'Character and Opinion in the United States' is his comprehensive critique of American thought and civilization and reflects the detached cosmopolitan perspective that lent his criticism its characteristic objectivity and strength. Santayana's subject here is the conflict of materialism and idealism in American life. In his view there exists a dualism in the American mind: One side, dealing with religion, literature, philosophy, and morality, tended to stay with inherited, old doctrines-the genteel tradition-and failed to keep pace with the other, practical side and its new developments in industry, invention, and social organization. Santayana traces the first mentality to Calvinism and its sense of sin, an attitude out of keeping with a new civilization and the dominance of practical interests. As a consequence of separating philosophy from everyday life, its study merely served religious and moral interests cut off from the free search for truth. At the heart of the book is Santayana's examination of the influential thought of William James and Josiah Royce, who typified for him the dilemma of American thought. The subordination of thought to social form and custom underlies Santayana's sharp critique of academic philosophy at Harvard where he early on studied and taught. He was disturbed by the very idea of philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy, he felt, should be an individual, original creation, "something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught" Santayana's analysis of how social imperatives may impede the pursuit of knowledge remains pertinent to contemporary intellectual debate. This volume ill be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and American studies specialists.
Download or read book Character and Opinion in the United States with Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America written by George Santayana and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a collection of articles on the nature of America and of being American, composed from lectures originally addressed to British audiences by George Santayana. This fascinating collection, first published in 1921, will appeal to those with an interest in the development of America and its philosophy, and is not to be missed by fans and collectors of Santayana’s work. The chapters of this book include: “The Moral Background”, “The Academic Environment”, “William James”, “Josiah Royce”, “Later Speculations”, “Materialism and Idealism in American Life”, and “English Liberty in America”. George Santayana (1863 - 1952) was an influential philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He was brought up in the United States and called himself an American, despite the fact that he always made sure that he had a valid Spanish passport. Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now, in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.
Download or read book George Santayana written by Irving Singer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana was unique in his contribution to American culture. For almost sixty years before his death in 1952, he combined literary and philosophical talents, writing not only important works of philosophy but also a best-selling novel, volumes of poetry, and much literary criticism. In this fascinating portrait of Santayana’s thought and complex personality, Irving Singer explores the full range of his harmonization of the literary and the philosophical. Singer shows how Santayana’s genius consisted in his imaginative ability to turn various types of personal alienation into creative elements that recur throughout his books. Singer points out that Santayana was a professional philosopher who addressed immediate problems of existence, a materialist in philosophy who believed in both a life of spirit and a life of reason, a product of American pragmatism who nevertheless rebelled against it, a Spaniard who wrote only in English, an American author who spent the last forty years of his life in different European countries. Against the grain of most twentieth-century philosophy, Santayana kept in view questions that matter to us all in our search for meaningful and satisfying lives.
Download or read book George Santayana Collection written by George Santayana and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana (December 16, 1863 - September 26, 1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. His last will was to be buried in the Spanish Pantheon of the Cimitero Monumentale del Verano in Rome. Santayana is known for famous sayings, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Santayana is broadly included among the pragmatists with Harvard University colleagues William James and Josiah Royce. He said that he stood in philosophy "exactly where [he stood] in daily life." In this book: The Sense of Beauty, Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory Three Philosophical Poets, Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe Character and Opinion in the United States Winds Of Doctrine, Studies in Contemporary Opinion Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, Five Essays
Download or read book The Sense of Beauty written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Philosophy of George Santayana written by Paul Arthur Schilpp and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophical Opinion in America written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Letters of George Santayana Book Eight 1948 1952 written by George Santayana and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
