George Santayana

El fragmento, inédito en español, pertenece al capítulo IX de La razón en el sentido común, libro primero de La vida de la razón, 5 vols. (1905-1906) del filósofo hispano-norteamericano Jorge/George Santayana (Madrid, 1862-Roma, 1953). Santayana aborda aquí la relación entre mente y cerebro desde un naturalismo materialista, que ha asumido por completo la revolución intelectual darwinista, y mostrando ser un fino analista de la experiencia de la acción consciente.

Although recent work has been done on the Barnes Foundation and its philosophical and pedagogical background, almost all the research effort has been focused on the friendship and intellectual link between John Dewey and Albert C. Barnes. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the impact of George Santayana’s philosophy on the Foundation has not been systematically examined. The hypothesis that we present and develop in this article is that Santayana’s thought is essential for the aesthetic theories elaborated within the (...) framework of the Barnes Foundation: Barnes’ theory of art criticism; Dewey’s aesthetic theory, and even Lawerence Buermeyer’s aesthetic theory. This article is a first approximation with the purpose of clarifying these philosophical, theoretical and historical relationship so as to start to fill the existing gap in contemporary literature on the topic. (shrink)

The first comprehensive study of Santayana’s political thought as connected to his cultural criticism. It ranges over topics such as Santayana’s political ontology, his criticism of democracy, liberalism, and communism, his views on freedom and forms of human servitude.

I argue that the dichotomous treatment of agency and free will is problematic because it rests on a Cartesian interpretation of self and world that many present-day thinkers take themselves to be denying. I do so in order to reconstruct the concept of human agency using the psychologies of American philosophers John Dewey and George Santayana. Identifying the self with the entire organism, as these thinkers do, allows for an importantly different sense of agency. In embracing an organismic interpretation of (...) the self, we achieve a more realistic yet mitigated sense of agency, where real responsibility for action is placed in a context of biological and environmental (including social, cultural, and historical) influences. (shrink)

Herman J. Saatkamp’s _A Life of Scholarship with Santayana: Essays and Reflections_ gathers together his work of a lifetime. There are twenty-three pieces, in three sections: “Santayana and Philosophy,” “Editorship,” and “Genetic Concerns and the Future of Philosophy.”.

»Wer die Vergangenheit nicht kennt, ist dazu verurteilt, sie zu wiederholen.« – Ein aphoristisches Diktum, das besonders in Deutschland weit verbreitet als Mahnung nachhallt, dessen Autor George Santayana (1863–1952) aber in Vergessenheit geraten ist. Diese Studie geht erstmals im deutschsprachigen Raum der gesamten philosophischen Spannweite seines Werks und dessen zumeist hintergründiger Systematik nach. Darin fördert sie einen einst eminenten Philosophen des ›Golden Age of American Philosophy‹ zutage, der nicht nur in seinem in vielerlei Hinsicht ›unamerikanischen‹ Denken den Blick auf die (...) amerikanische Geistesgeschichte erweitert. Durch Santayanas Vermittlung vermeintlich widerstreitender Pole wird gleichzeitig deutlich, dass es sich bei ihm um eine einzigartige Gestalt der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts insgesamt handelt – ein konsequenter Materialist, der deswegen »religiös musikalisch« und offen für die Schönheit bleibt; ein kritischer Realist, der darin nicht nur um das unentrinnbar Symbolische und Poetische weiß, sondern es zelebriert. Es ist eine Philosophie, die über isolierte Sentenzen hinaus bis heute denkerische Impulse mit Blick auf Erkenntnistheorie, Ontologie, Religiosität, Kulturkritik sowie die individuelle Lebensführung zu geben vermag. -/- English Translation: -/- "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - An aphoristic dictum that resonates, especially in Germany, widely as a reminder, but whose author George Santayana (1863-1982) has rather been forgotten. This study undertakes the first reconstruction of the entire philosophical range of his work and its mostly enigmatic system in the German-speaking area. This brings to light a once eminent philosopher of the 'Golden Age of American Philosophy', who not only expands the view of American intellectual history with his in many ways 'un-American' thinking. Through Santayana's mediation of supposedly contradictory poles, it becomes clear at the same time that he is a unique figure in the philosophy of the 20th century as a whole – a consequent materialist, who therefore remains "religiously musical" and open to beauty; a critical realist, who thus not only knows about the inescapably symbolic and poetic, but who celebrates it. It is a philosophy that even to this day provides, beyond isolated aphorisms, intellectual stimuli to epistemology, ontology, religiosity, cultural criticism as well as to the individual conduct of life. (shrink)