SANTAYANA, GEORGE
(1863–1952)

George Santayana, the philosopher and man of letters, was born in Madrid. His parents separated within a few years of his birth, and his mother went to live in Boston, Massachusetts, with the children of a previous marriage. Santayana grew up in Ávila under his father's care, but at the age of eight he joined his mother in Boston. He was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College. After graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied in Germany for two years and then returned to take his doctorate at Harvard, for which he wrote a thesis on Rudolf Lotze. He subsequently joined the department of philosophy and remained a member of the Harvard faculty until 1912, when a small inheritance permitted him to retire. He lived in England for a number of years and then in Paris, but in 1925 he finally settled in Rome. During World War II, he took refuge in the convent of an order of English nuns in Rome, and he continued to live there until his death.

Cultural Background

Both Santayana's personal life and his philosophical development were decisively influenced by his peculiar position as a Spanish Catholic living and teaching in a predominantly Protestant society with a philosophical and cultural tradition that he felt to be in many respects deeply alien to his own personality. He was always proud—rather defiantly so—of his Catholicism and his Latinity, despite the fact that he was not a believer and was not notably attached to Spain or to Spanish culture. These loyalties expressed instead a deeply rooted hostility to the commercial and democratic ethos of modern industrial society and an equally deep aspiration toward a radically different style of life and thought that, for Santayana, was best exemplified in the classical Mediterranean world. Philosophically, he felt his truest affinities to be with the Greeks and perhaps the Hindus, and among the moderns, with Benedict de Spinoza, rather than with the empiricism and idealism of German and Anglo American philosophy. In fact, however, his points of affiliation with the European and American philosophy of the modern period are both numerous and obvious, and it would appear that his debt to the post-Cartesian tradition in modern philosophy is much greater than he was inclined to think. What chiefly set his work apart from the mainstream of twentieth-century philosophy was his highly personal and literary mode of writing and his rather disdainful lack of interest in the methodological questions that were of central importance to the development of phenomenology on the Continent and analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world. When one considers the substantive doctrines to which he was committed, however, and, in particular, the ontological distinctions on which his "Realms of Being" rest, his philosophy emerges as a highly idiosyncratic doctrine of transcendental subjectivity that would scarcely be conceivable apart from the very tradition of modern philosophy which he so violently criticized.

Philosophical Development

Santayana's philosophical career falls naturally into two main periods. The first of these is the period in which he published The Sense of Beauty (1896) and The Life of Reason (1905–1906); its chief distinguishing feature is Santayana's disposition at that time to conceive of philosophy as a kind of descriptive psychology of the higher mental functions. He assumed the broad truth of the doctrine of biological evolution and its relevance to the understanding of mental phenomena, and while he held all knowledge to be representational in nature, he did not question "our knowledge of the external world," nor did he feel the need for any initial withdrawal of belief in such a world in the Cartesian manner. "Mind" is placed firmly in its biological context, and such independence as it enjoys is due not to any special ontological status, but rather to its capacity for giving an ideal and aesthetic meaning to its natural setting and functions.

In the second period, during which he wrote Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Realms of Being (1927–1940), Santayana came to feel the need for a greater systematic rigor in the exposition of his views and for a purified and nonpsychological mode of stating the fundamental distinctions on which his philosophy rested. In particular, he felt that in The Life of Reason he had not made clear enough that the "nature" described there as having been "drawn like a sponge, heavy and dripping from the waters of sentience" was the idea of nature, not nature itself. He now tried to correct this error by means of a set of ontological—that is, nonpsychological—distinctions between the different kinds of being that are the objects of different kinds of mental activity. Thus, imagination, for example, must be defined by reference to the essences or abstract characters that Santayana now recognized as having a distinct ontological status, rather than the other way around. In carrying out this revision of his earlier views, Santayana was in some measure aligning himself with similar antipsychologistic tendencies at work in the logical realism of Bertrand Russell, as well as in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, which he regarded as having a certain affinity to his own views.

Some commentators have felt that this shift from what they describe as Santayana's earlier naturalism to his later "Platonism" amounted to a fundamental change in his general philosophical perspective. Santayana's own statements, however, make it clear that the system presented in Realms of Being is to be understood as the ultimate philosophical basis of the naturalistic Weltanschauung sketched out in The Life of Reason, in which he had paid relatively little attention to technical philosophical issues. It must be admitted that the moral atmosphere of the two works differs, and that in the later one Santayana seems even more the detached spectator of the noncontemplative phases of the "life of reason" than he had before. But this is as much a personal as a philosophical matter, and there is no good reason for denying the fundamental unity of Santayana's thought during the two main periods of its development.

Aesthetics

Santayana's first important philosophical work was The Sense of Beauty (1896). In it he attempted to state a complete aesthetic theory, which he later developed further in Reason in Art (1905), Volume IV of The Life of Reason. In the earlier book, aesthetic theory is characterized as a psychological inquiry whose data are aesthetic judgments considered as "phenomena of mind and products of mental evolution"; the inquiry is to be distinguished both from the actual exercise of critical judgment and from the historical investigation of the evolution of the various art forms. Santayana argued that this inquiry must be carried out independently of metaphysical issues and the "interests of the moral consciousness," and that it must make clear the bases of aesthetic experience in human nature as conceived by natural science and in particular evolutionary biology. To this end, Santayana sketched out a theory of value according to which all preference is an essentially irrational expression of vital interest and the standard of value is the enjoyment or pleasure procurable through different courses of action. Morality is concerned with negative values, namely, the avoidance of pain and suffering, while aesthetic value is concerned with positive enjoyment and stands in the same relation to morality as play does to work.

The pleasure that is distinctively aesthetic, however, must be further qualified as intrinsic (or immediate) and as "objectified," in the sense of being experienced as a quality of a thing and not as an affection of the organ which apprehends it. Santayana denied that it must have the disinterested character attributed to it by Immanuel Kant and that it must be universally shared. He defined beauty as "pleasure objectified."

medium, form, expressiveness

Santayana added to this definition of beauty a threefold distinction between the materials of a work of art, its form, and its expressiveness. Of these, the first two are intrinsic features of the work of art, which thus consists of sensuous elements that have varying degrees of aesthetic value by themselves, and a form or arrangement by means of which these elements are unified and which has its own distinctive value. This synthesis, which constitutes form, is "an activity of the mind." While Santayana throws out suggestions as to how the nature of our perceptual apparatus may determine which forms give pleasure, these suggestions are never developed, and there is a heavily mentalistic cast to his whole account of aesthetic experience. This is particularly true of his treatment of expression, which is the power of a work of art to suggest images and ideas that, by becoming associated with it, enhance its value. These associated values may be aesthetic, practical, or moral; or they may be intellectual, as they are in the case of those forms of art, for example, tragedy, which present the ugly as well as the beautiful, and whose value thereby consists in satisfying our desire to know life as a whole. In the end, however, while these distinctions of materials, form, and expression have the validity proper to their spheres, the experience of beauty remains, according to Santayana, unique and unanalyzable.

function of art

In Reason in Art Santayana was concerned with the place of art, as one good among many, within the moral economy of the life of reason. He distinguished between the practical arts and the fine arts and explained the emergence of the latter from the former through the gradual growth of an appreciation of the intrinsic value of what originally had merely instrumental value. Applying this principle, Santayana described the development of music, poetry, and the plastic arts, and in each case attempted to relate the special features of the artistic medium to the mode of abstraction and selectivity that is peculiar to a given art form. He treated all works of art as more or less abstract symbolizations of the natural environment and interests of human beings, and as being animated by an internal "dialectic" of their own through which the moral and dramatic unities of our experience are indirectly expressed. There can be no absolute or universal principles for criticizing works of art, since our critical judgments are simply the corrections or modifications that our aesthetic preference undergoes in the wake of experience; and there is no a priori guarantee that these corrections must be convergent. The ultimate justification of art is simply that it adds greatly to human enjoyment, and thus to human happiness.

The Life of Reason

Santayana intended The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress (1905–1906) as a naturalistic biography of the human mind, but as he himself pointed out, it was at least partially inspired by G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. What appealed to Santayana in that work and similar ones in the idealistic tradition was the idea of sympathetically espousing the changing perspectives—scientific, moral, religious, and aesthetic—by which the mind progressively defines its relationship to its natural milieu. By beginning with Reason in Common Sense, he hoped to avoid the fundamental error of the idealists, which was to lose all sense of the dependency of this evolution upon a nonmental nature and of its responsiveness to the strains and stresses of our animal being. For the fraudulent dialectical necessity that Hegel had imposed on human history, Santayana proposed to substitute an appraisal—in the broad sense, a moral appraisal—of the contribution made by each of these phases of human development to the ideal of a rational and happy life.

reason and imagination

In Reason in Common Sense, the discovery of natural objects is described as the first and irreversible achievement of human reason operating upon the materials of sense experience. Knowledge of these objects is inevitably representative and indirect, and the relationship of thought to reality must be conceived as an ideal correspondence and not as a material appropriation. Coordinate with these "concretions in experience" are "concretions in discourse," or concepts which sustain among one another all manner of "dialectical" relationships; and the active elaboration of these is the generic activity of imagination. Imagination becomes understanding when, almost by accident, some of its structures prove to be faithful transcriptions of a sequence of natural events; but even when the understanding is most successful, there remain unassimilable traits of experience which, at best, have a tangential relation to the natural order.

Toward the free creative activity of the imagination itself, Santayana maintained a dual attitude. It must not, he said, be allowed to impose itself as a literal rendering of what exists, as it all too often attempts to do. When it is allowed to do so, it can only produce a fantastic physics in which dramatic and moral unities are substituted for unities of fact and real process. In another sense, however, the life of reason is the life of the imagination, and its function of idealization and symbolic transformation yields the highest and purest enjoyments of the mental life. Even when the imagination becomes practical, as it does in science, it is the intrinsic aesthetic value of its creations, and not their ulterior practical use, which gives them a place within the life of reason. But at the same time that he praised the imagination, Santayana continually warned against the tendency to confer substantial reality upon the essences it elaborates and to assign to them a causal efficacy within the order of nature. The only power that Santayana was willing to attribute to consciousness itself was that of conferring meaning and ideal unity upon events, and it is in this sense that he described himself as being a materialist.

religion

If Santayana's theory of the imagination finds its most natural application in his treatment of art, an area in which the claim to any literal validity is reduced to a minimum, the case of religion, which he considers in Reason in Religion, Vol. III of The Life of Reason, is somewhat different. Religion, Santayana said, is a poetic transformation of natural life in the interest of the moral ordering of that life, even though each religion is typically regarded by its followers as embodying a literal truth. Religion is myth, and it presents "an inverted image of things in which their moral effects are turned into their dramatic antecedents." Because it is myth, religion must not be judged by the inappropriate standard of literal truth, but on the basis of the imaginative richness and comprehensiveness of its reorganization of our moral experience. One's religion is in fact something like one's language or nationality—a native idiom of the moral life which may have its imperfections, but which is both difficult and unwise wholly to abandon. Mystical religions are those that effect vast simplifications of the moral life by excluding all but one element in the natural life, while fanatical religions are those that suppress, on the authority of their own unique truth, all forms of moral poetry other than their own. In Santayana's view, both are inimical to the true value of religion, which is the encouragement it gives us to live in the imagination. True religion stimulates both piety, which Santayana defined as "man's reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment," and spirituality, which liberates us from the harsh realities of animal need and desire by interposing an ideal meaning—one that assigns to the goods of this world their proper and subordinate place.

What is paradoxical in Santayana's philosophy of religion is the fact that while he treated all religions as having, at best, a symbolic or expressive truth, he severely condemned the liberals and "modernists" who have attempted, while remaining within the church, to substitute for the literalistic dogmatism of the past a view of religion that in many respects resembles the one held by Santayana himself. It seems inconsistent to deny that a claim to literal truth is essential to religion and at the same time to require that those who surrender this claim must leave the church. This is perhaps a special case of a general paradox resulting from the fact that while Santayana declared "spirit" to be wholly inefficacious, it is an intrinsic feature of the life of reason that spirit should view itself as having efficient power. One may also speculate as to whether Santayana's distaste for views resembling his own, when they become more than the private insights of detached and passive observers and are applied to the task of modifying some institution such as a church, did not itself express a social attitude and a partisanship that cannot claim any special philosophical justification.

social theory

Santayana's theory of society is stated in Reason in Society, Volume II of The Life of Reason, and also, in expanded form, in Dominations and Powers (1949), his last major work. In the main, social life is assigned a subordinate role within the life of reason. Its principal task and justification is the generation of, and care for, human beings, and it serves ideal ends only incidentally. Society originates in the reproductive instinct, and while this instinct lends itself readily to imaginative development, it finds its ultimate fruition in institutions (the family, the army, the state) that are predominantly practical in nature and, at best, capable of a retrospective idealization. It is, of course, possible for individuals to become associated with one another outside the disciplinary framework of these primary institutions, and when they do so freely, on the basis of a common allegiance to an ideal, they form what Santayana called a "free," or "rational," society. Patriotism is the loyalty they feel to such societies; but the deepest loyalties of the life of reason are not to anything actual, but to the ideal presences of which, Santayana said, our human partners in the pursuit of the ideal, as well as we ourselves, are at best imperfect symbols. Thus it turns out that the true society—the only society that is a perfect instrument of the life of reason—is the society of the mind and of the essences it entertains.

If Santayana's theory of society expresses, as indeed it does, a profound lack of interest in the practical concerns by which any human society is principally animated, he was nevertheless not without his own strong preferences with regard to a certain ordering of society. A pervasive animus against democracy and liberalism runs through all his discussions of society and is perhaps most noticeable in Dominations and Powers (1949). Human society, Santayana argued, is necessarily aristocratic and hierarchical, and egalitarian democracy, which would put an end to the injustice that social inequality so often generates, succeeds only in destroying the interest of life by denying or attempting to suppress our inevitable human diversity. An authentic and "natural" aspiration to some good expresses itself in the form of an authoritative direction of the more passive members of a society and shapes their lives in the light of this aspiration's own moral vision. Accordingly, Santayana frequently tended to identify strong authoritarian government with the natural bent of a self-assertive vitality and uniformly treated liberalism as an incoherent and sterile principle of dissolution, roughly comparable in its inspiration and effect to the Protestant principle in the province of religion. Both liberalism and the Protestant principle are expressions of that romantic individualism that Santayana was willing to tolerate as a kind of playful self-deception of the "inner life," but which he abominated whenever it took itself seriously and became a principle of action directed toward correcting the "natural" order of things.

morality

Strangely enough, it is in Reason in Science, Volume V of The Life of Reason, that Santayana's fullest exposition of his views on morality is to be found. In this work he distinguished between "rational" morality and the morality that is either "prerational" or "postrational." Rational morality is no longer the straightforward hedonism of The Sense of Beauty, for Santayana now recognized that there must be a principle of selective preference among possible enjoyments. But he still regarded our adoption of such an ideal standard as a matter of temperament and natural inclination; and even the attempt to achieve a comprehensive integration of diverse satisfactions, which is what distinguishes rational morality, is presented as just one possible attitude toward life. Rational morality and the moral philosophy associated with it, Santayana argued, are concerned with what is really good, and they require a highly developed capacity for sympathetic understanding and assessment of all competing goods; but in the end, what is really good can only be what genuinely expresses some vital bias of our natures. By contrast, prerational morality is the unreflective life of primary impulse, which cannot conceive the possibility of alternative goods nor support the discipline entailed by a principled organization of the moral life. Postrational morality, finally, is an essentially religious abandonment of the hope for a rational ordering of human life in favor of some otherworldly ideal. Its sole strength, as Santayana observed, lies in the remnant of natural assertiveness that survives in its condemnation of the works of the natural man and the desperate energy with which a single and exclusive regimen of life is proclaimed to be the sole means of salvation.

science

Santayana's attitude toward science, as one phase of the life of reason, was an inconsistent mixture of hospitality and indifference. Convinced as he was that all causal efficacy belongs to physical nature, he was strongly inclined to accept the claim of science to exclusive authority in the determination of what is really true. Natural science is at once an extension of common sense and a uniquely successful application of "dialectics," that is, the logical elaboration of terms of thought, or "concretions in discourse," to the study of the physical world. The ideal of such a science would be a closed, mechanistic, and materialistic system, and Santayana believed that progress in the sciences of man, notably psychology, required the adoption of this ideal. But beyond this recognition of the authority of science, Santayana had no detailed interest in its findings and only a very limited belief in its power to contribute to those ideal values that are the true substance of the life of reason. It deals, after all, with only one of many possible worlds; and while the discipline of fact to which it subjects the mind is infinitely preferable to the projection upon the world of some moral fable of our own devising, the highest form of intellectual freedom is still to survey the field of ideal possibilities without any sense of an obligation to describe or a fear of misdescribing any actual state of affairs.

Scepticism and Animal Faith

In Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), Santayana undertook the extensive recasting of his whole system of thought; to which reference has been made above. The reformulation was to consist in the substitution of a set of ontological distinctions for the introspective psychology of his earlier writings. Properly speaking, this work is an introduction to, and a partial summary of, the main doctrines of Realms of Being (1927–1940). It begins with an attempt to radicalize, and thus to overcome, the idealistic skepticism concerning the existence of an external world that has been a central theme of Western philosophy since René Descartes. The argument is that if we limit ourselves to what is immediately given (and therefore incapable of being doubted), not only our belief in an external world, but also our belief in the existence of the self, of other selves, and of a past and a future is undermined. All that remain are certain characters or essences that bear no relationship to things or events and cannot properly be said to "exist."

Santayana's point is that a genuine skepticism, pushed to its logical extreme, is just as fatal to the "mind" of the idealists as it is to the matter they were prepared to abandon. In a positive sense, the upshot of such skepticism is to reveal essence as the primary and incontestable mode of being; but it is practically and psychologically impossible for human beings to recognize only essential being. "Animal faith" thus supervenes upon the intuition of essence and posits the existence of a world of things and events that transcends immediate intuition. In one sense this belief is quite baseless, since there cannot, in a strict sense, be proof that anything exists; but in another sense this belief is the beginning of wisdom. In this conception there is no great shift away from the view set forth in The Life of Reason. The chief difference, however, is that in Scepticism and Animal Faith the commitment to existence and to substance (which in the earlier work was presented retrospectively as the first great achievement in the history of consciousness) is first dramatically revoked and then reinstated by the individual mind. But with respect to the logical status and practical necessity of this belief, Santayana's views would not appear to have undergone any significant change.

The Realms of Being

The Realms of Being is a detailed characterization of the four major modes of being or basic categories that emerge from the skeptical self-interrogation of consciousness. The modes of being consist of essence and matter, as noted above, and two derivative modes, truth and spirit.

essence

The being of essence is first carefully distinguished from certain adventitious notions that have been associated with it in the history of Western philosophy. Among these are the views that attribute causal efficacy or some special moral or aesthetic status to essences as such, and also the views that envisage essence only in the context of some mental activity such as "abstraction" or "imagination." Properly conceived, the being of essence consists simply in the self-identity of its character. Since this intrinsic character involves no reference to any location in space or time, essences are universal and repeatable. They are infinite in number and yet collectively compose one absolute essence in "Pure Being," which is common to all essences. Essences are logically discrete and individual, and one essence can "imply" another only if it is first stipulated that the relationship is that of a whole to one of its parts and that no logical necessity governs the constitution of such wholes. Essences may be exemplified in the realm of matter, but they need not be; and even when they are, the things and events that are the bearers of these ideal characters have a quite different mode of being.

matter

The "indispensable properties" of the material mode of being are spatial extension and temporal process. Matter exists contingently and is therefore unstable and evanescent; but it also maintains a dynamic continuity, through change and can in this sense be called "substance." It is external to and independent of consciousness; and it is ultimately unknowable, since we know it only through the essences it exemplifies—and these are radically incapable of representing the element of process and diffusion that is peculiar to the realm of matter. Organisms are part of that realm, and the psychological histories (as distinct from the pure consciousness) of human beings can be understood only by reference to the behavioral unity that Santayana calls the "psyche."

truth

Originally, Santayana had intended to establish only three "Realms of Being," and in fact the Realm of Truth that he later added has obvious affinities with both essence and matter. Truth is the truth about matter, or what exists, and yet it is independent of existence both because "no fact can be a description of itself" and because even if nothing existed, it would still be true that nothing did exist or that just such and such things had existed in the past. Truth is "the sum of all the propositions," and as such it represents a certain selection from the infinite essences or character that things might have had. Truth is timeless and independent of all beliefs. There are no necessary truths, and even the propositions of mathematics are only contingently true since it is simply an accident if they correctly describe the material world.

spirit

Spirit, as Santayana used the term, is simply pure transcendental consciousness, and as such it must be distinguished from its physical basis (the "psyche") and from particular mental events. The only criterion of the existence of spirit is internal; and it exists contingently. It is entirely passive in its relation to physical nature, and its sole function is pure intuition, which, Santayana says, is "the direct and obvious possession of the apparent without commitments of any sort about its truth, significance, or material existence." The unities of intuition are simply individual essences and are not the product of any mental machinery. By itself, intuition is not cognitive. Considered simply as a skein of meanings, the life of intuition may acquire a unity and a life and even a kind of freedom that lacks the power to intervene in the world but is nevertheless the highest and purest human good.

To some extent, The Realms of Being effects a clarification of Santayana's earlier views, although it may be doubted whether he was ever in much danger of being taken for an idealist. Unfortunately, the style of the later book is even more luxuriant than that of The Life of Reason, and Santayana's unwillingness to argue technical philosophical issues was still as strong as ever. If what he hoped to present in Realms of Being was, as he says, a language in which the great distinctions to which we all have recourse would be clearly marked out, his success must be judged to be only very partial. All doctrines of transcendental subjectivity, including Santayana's, engender immense difficulties which cannot be resolved unless the philosopher is more inclined to meet criticism on some ground other than the assumed truth of his own views. In Realms of Being, there are very few signs, of such a disposition on Santayana's part.

Critical Works

Santayana was not just a philosopher in his own right but also a critic, both philosophical and aesthetic. Several of his books, among them Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), Three Philosophical Poets (1910), Winds of Doctrine (1913), Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927), and Obiter Scripta (1936), are made up of critical studies of systems of thought as diverse as the pragmatism of William James and the atomism of Lucretius; and in many ways, Santayana was at his best as a critic; and in many ways, Santayana was at his best as a critic. In spite of the severity of his judgments and his tendency to use both philosophers and imaginative writers as stalking horses for his own philosophical purposes, he seldom failed to make some telling observation or incisive criticism that had a validity independent of his own special point of view. At the same time, it must be noted that in his critical essays he too often affected an Olympian manner that only partially concealed the strongly personal character of his tastes and distastes both for individuals and ideas.

See also Aesthetic Judgment; Aesthetics, History of; Art, Expression in; Beauty; Descartes, René; Essence and Existence; Husserl, Edmund; Kant, Immanuel; Lotze, Rudolf Hermann; Realism; Russell, Bertrand Arthur William; Skepticism, History of; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) de; Value and Valuation.

Bibliography

works by santayana

Major Philosophical Works

The Sense of Beauty. New York: Scribners, 1896.

The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress. 5 vols. New York: Scribners, 1905–1906; 1 vol. ed., New York, 1954.

Scepticism and Animal Faith. New York: Scribners, 1923.

Realms of Being. 4 vols. New York: Scribners, 1927–1940; 1 vol. ed., 1941.

"Three Proofs of Realism." In Essays in Critical Realism. New York, 1941.

Dominations and Powers. New York: Scribners, 1949.

Critical Writings

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. New York: Scribners, 1900.

Three Philosophical Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1910.

Winds of Doctrine. New York: Scribners, 1913.

Egotism in German Philosophy. New York: Scribners, 1915.

Character and Opinion in the United States. New York: Scribners, 1920.

Platonism and the Spiritual Life. New York: Scribners, 1927.

Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy. New York: Scribners, 1933.

Obiter Scripta, edited by J. Buchler and B. Schwartz. New York: Scribners, 1936.

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. New York: Scribners, 1946.

Other Works

The Last Puritan. New York: Scribners, 1936. Santayana's only novel, which is also a "memoir" of considerable interest.

Persons and Places. 3 vols. New York: Scribners, 1944–1953. Autobiography.

The Letters of George Santayana, edited by Daniel Cory. New York: Scribners, 1955.

works on santayana

Duron, Jacques. La pensée de George Santayana. Paris: Nizet, 1950. A massive and detailed study of Santayana's whole philosophy.

Howgate, George W. George Santayana. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938. A less technical study of Santayana, mainly as a critic and aesthetician.

Munitz, Milton. The Moral Philosophy of Santayana. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.

Schilpp, P. A., ed. The Philosophy of George Santayana. Vol. II in the Library of Living Philosophers. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1940. A collection of critical essays by a group of philosophers, among them Bertrand Russell, with an autobiographical statement by Santayana, a detailed reply to his critics, and a detailed bibliography. The most useful single work on Santayana's philosophy.

Singer, Irving. Santayana's Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Frederick A. Olafson (1967)