George Santayana

George Santayana (1863-1952), American philosopher, poet, and novelist, whose wide-ranging philosophical speculation was expressed in a style of great literary distinction.

Santayana was born in Madrid, Spain, December 16, 1863. He moved with his father to Boston in 1872, and he subsequently attended Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard he continued his studies in Germany and England, returning in 1889 to join the faculty at Harvard. His first published work was a volume of poetry, Sonnets and Other Verses (1894). He was professor of philosophy at Harvard from 1907 to 1912, when he moved to Oxford, England. After World War I he made his home in Rome.

Santayana systematically developed his ethical philosophy in his first major work, The Life of Reason (5 volumes, 1905-6), in which he attempted to unify science, art, and religion on a naturalistic basis by interpreting each as a different but equally valid mode of symbolism. His personal impressions of his colleagues at Harvard and of their philosophical views are recorded in Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), in which he expresses both appreciation and trenchant criticism of American thought. As a leading member of the philosophical school of critical realism that developed in the U.S. in the 1920s, he maintained that reality is entirely external to consciousness and is known therefore only by inference from the sensory data within consciousness.

Santayana developed a complex theory of the structure of reality and its relation to consciousness in Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Realms of Being (5 volumes, 1927-40). In these works he reduced mind to an emergent property of matter; distinguished material reality from essences, that is, qualities and forms that are mere possibilities; and maintained that all beliefs about the external world rest on a so-called animal faith. His other writings include the philosophical and critical works The Sense of Beauty (1896), Three Philosophical Poets (1910), Winds of Doctrine (1913), Dialogues in Limbo (1926), Dominations and Powers (1951); the novel The Last Puritan (1936); and three volumes of autobiography, Persons and Places (1944), The Middle Span (1945), and My Host the World (posthumously, 1953). He died September 26, 1952.

Santayana's influence on American thought was pervasive, although he did not found a philosophic school. His sharp but basically sympathetic criticisms of pragmatism stimulated the American philosopher John Dewey and others to refine their position. By recognizing value in disinterested objectivity and aesthetic contemplation, as well as in practical accomplishment, he helped to make pragmatism a more subtle and comprehensive philosophy. Santayana's cultivated style and blend of aesthetic sensibility with rational thought gave a literary and humanistic tone to American philosophical discourse.