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George Santayana

Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats's memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. Using contemporary classifications, Santayana is the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher.

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shiraz bukharihar citeretfor 3 måneder siden
Santayana’s students, many of whom revered him, included such revolutionary modernists as T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens
shiraz bukharihar citeretfor 3 måneder siden
Like Plato and Nietzsche, the cosmopolitan Santayana belongs to that rare company of thinkers who bring an essentially literary sensibility to philosophical speculation.
shiraz bukharihar citeretfor 3 måneder siden
“a very great thought, perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon. . . . It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance.”
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