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. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters.
Santayana is known for the sayings, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and “[O]nly the dead have seen the end of war.” The latter sentence is often (for example, at the start of the film Black Hawk Down) falsely attributed to Plato; the former appears in Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of Santayana’s five-volume Life of Reason. (In the 1905 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition, it is found on page 284.) 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.”
Santayana’s main philosophical work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), his first book-length monograph and perhaps the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason five volumes, 1905–6, the high point of his Harvard career; Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–40). Although Santayana was not a pragmatist in the mold of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, or John Dewey, The Life of Reason arguably is the first extended treatment of pragmatism written.
Like many of the classical pragmatists, and because he was also well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to metaphysical naturalism. He believed that human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may then be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness. The alternate title to The Life of Reason, “the Phases of Human Progress”, is indicative of this metaphysical stance.
Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but also admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius (of the three authors on whom he wrote in Three Philosophical Poets, Santayana speaks most favorably of Lucretius). He held Spinoza’s writings in high regard, without subscribing to the latter’s rationalism or pantheism.
Although an agnostic, he held a fairly benign view of religion, in contrast to Bertrand Russell who held that religion was harmful. Santayana’s views on religion are outlined in his books Reason in Religion, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Santayana described himself as an “aesthetic Catholic”. He spent the last decade of his life at the Convent of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary on the Celian Hill at 6 Via Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, where he was cared for by the Irish sisters.
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