SANTAYANA, GEORGE

Santayana, George: translation

(1863–1952)

Man of letters and philosopher. Santayana was born in Madrid, but his mother having emigrated to the USA, was educated as a student of James's at Harvard. James described his doctoral dissertation on Lotze as the ‘perfection of rottenness’ (Santayana in turn described James's Varieties of Religious Experience as ‘slumming’); in spite of this Santayana taught at Harvard until 1912, when he retired to Europe. In early works such as The Sense of Beauty (1896) and the five-volume The Life of Reason (1905–6) he follows a naturalistic, psychological method, but later (in the four-volume Realms of Being, 1927–40) he developed an idiosyncratic combination of Platonism and materialism . He is remembered as much for his works of literature and criticism as for his contributions to philosophy.