Santayana The Philosopher

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The Life of Reason

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 150404441X
Total Pages : 839 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life of Reason by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana’s renowned work of moral philosophy outlines his vision of the ideal life. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana’s The Life of Reason stands as one of the most influential and beautifully written works of philosophical naturalism. In it, Santayana articulates his vision of human progression from chaos to reason and the pursuit of the ideal life. Focusing his thought on the lived experiences of people, these phases are traced through humanity’s many endeavors, including art, science, politics, religion, friendship, and reason. Drawing on a range of influences, from Democritus and Aristotle to Spinoza and Schopenhauer, Santayana develops a materialist system of thought that stresses the importance of imagination and spiritual experience. Originally published in five volumes, from 1905 to 1906, The Life of Reason is Santayana’s most complete statement of moral philosophy and an inspiring account of human dignity. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

George Santayana's Philosophy of Religion

Author : Edward W. Lovely
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0739176269
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

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Book Synopsis George Santayana's Philosophy of Religion by : Edward W. Lovely

Download or read book George Santayana's Philosophy of Religion written by Edward W. Lovely and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana (1862-1952) of Spanish descent, and generally claimed to be in the canon of American philosophers, was substantially influenced by his Roman Catholic origins in his philosophical disposition toward the value of tradition, religious symbols and dogma. His philosophical project sustained a respectful attitude toward the spiritual value of orthodox religion while the thrust of his philosophy was naturalistic and materialistic throughout. There is a perception by some scholars that Santayana's philosophy evolved from a humanistic perspective to a more spiritual one in his later years. It is the position of this thesis that his philosophy, at the "core" depicting a harmonious striving toward individual happiness, remained essentially consistent from his earliest publication of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion and The Life of Reason through his later works of Scepticism and Animal Faith, Realms of Being, Dominations and Powers and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. Santayana's philosophical approach is both phenomenological and social constructionist in its methodology, significantly preempting the methodology of social constructionist theology and a post-modern interpretation of religion. His idiosyncratic phenomenological approach is compared with a "benchmark" methodology of Edmund Husserl, the generally accepted founder of the phenomenological method. There are also important similarities between Santayana's phenomenological approach and those of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. The basis for the comparison of the phenomenological methodology of Santayana and Husserl is their mutually similar fundamental theory of intuited essence. Santayana's contribution to religious studies is not only philosophical but also theological where he has utilized Christian theological language in transposing and interpolating his philosophy of religion to the Christian drama of the salvational Christ. Santayana's essay "Ultimate Religion" reflects his perspective of a disillusioned but still spiritual vision incorporating the piety, discipline, and spirituality; of a life of reason. Within the framework of this "model" Santayana's philosophy of religion is developed and explored. Finally, the relevance of Santayana's philosophy of religion to contemporary religious studies and selected religious issues is addressed with a delineation and discussion of some important aspects of his philosophical vision.

Three Philosophical Poets

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Union Square & Co.
ISBN 13 : 1435142233
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (351 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Philosophical Poets by : George Santayana

Download or read book Three Philosophical Poets written by George Santayana and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I am no specialist in the study of Lucretius; I am not a Dante scholar nor a Goethe scholar….My excuse for writing about them, notwithstanding, is merely the human excuse which every new poet has for writing about the spring. They have attracted me; they have moved me to reflection; they have revealed to me certain aspects of nature and of philosophy which I am prompted by mere sincerity to express, if anybody seems interested or willing to listen.” The modesty exhibited in the above disclaimer—from Santayana’s preface to Three Philosophical Poets—should be viewed in the context of the author’s extraordinary impact as a philosopher and teacher. The Sense of Beauty has claim to being the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; the multivolume The Life of Reason is arguably the first extended analysis of pragmatism anywhere. Among Santayana’s many well-known Harvard students, Wallace Stevens has acknowledged a clear debt to his work. Based on a course Santayana taught at Harvard, Three Philosophical Poets was first delivered to the public as a series of lectures at Columbia University in 1910. Santayana’s lifelong, learned meditation on the relationship between philosophy and art is apparent. (Santayana’s own prose style has long been considered among the most eloquent in all of philosophy.) Here, he discusses the chief phases of European philosophy—naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism—as they are set forth and epitomized by the works of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, respectively. Praise for Three Philosophical Poets and its author “[A] brilliant and admirable little book.” —T. S. Eliot “The exquisite and memorable way in which he has always said things has given so much delight that we accept what he says as we accept our own civilization. His pages are part of the douceur de vivre.” —Wallace Stevens “Santayana was the real excitement for me at Harvard, especially Three PhilosophicalPoets….It really fixed my view of what poetry should ultimately be.” —Conrad Aiken

Scepticism and Animal Faith

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Courier Corporation
ISBN 13 : 0486158322
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (861 download)

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Book Synopsis Scepticism and Animal Faith by : George Santayana

Download or read book Scepticism and Animal Faith written by George Santayana and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailed presentation of American philosopher's pragmatic concept of epistemology, isolation of realms of existents and subsistents. Chapters include "There is No First Principle of Criticism," "Dogma and Doubt," and "The Discovery of Essence."

The Letters of George Santayana: 1941-1947

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262195569
Total Pages : 648 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (621 download)

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Book Synopsis The Letters of George Santayana: 1941-1947 by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Letters of George Santayana: 1941-1947 written by George Santayana and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventh and penultimate book of the letters of American philosopher George Santayana, covering the years 1941 to 1947 and including letters to such correspondents as Daniel Cory, John Hall Wheelock, Robert Lowell, and others. This penultimate volume of Santayana's letters chronicles Santayana's life during a difficult time--the war years and the immediate postwar period. The advent of World War II left Santayana isolated in Rome, and the difficulties of wartime travel across borders forced him to abandon plans to move to more agreeable locations in Switzerland or Spain. During these years, Santayana lived in a single room in a nursing home run by the Blue Sisters of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, where, during the winter months, he did much of his writing in bed (wearing well-mended gloves) in order to stay warm. And yet, despite wartime deprivations, illness, and old age (he was 77 in 1941), Santayana was remarkably productive, completing both his autobiography Persons and Places and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: or God in Man, and all but completing Dominations and Powers. He confided to one correspondent that he had never been more at peace or more happy. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Seven are written to such correspondents as his friend and protégée Daniel Cory, his financial manager and heir George Sturgis, and the American poet Robert Lowell. The correspondence with Lowell--which began when the younger writer sent Santayana a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle--signals an important new friendship, which became a source of affection and intellectual engagement in Santayana's final years.

Santayana the Philosopher

Author : Daniel Moreno
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611486564
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis Santayana the Philosopher by : Daniel Moreno

Download or read book Santayana the Philosopher written by Daniel Moreno and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive analysis of his complete œuvre, however, reveals something else entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a conservative without political commitment, but, if one respects his own language, one discerns an astonishing, little-known Santayana, whose philosophical leitmotif consists in: 1) detecting the numerous “false steps,” logical and moral, supplied by the imagination when it confuses things with the names that designate them, or the world with the feelings that it provokes in the human animal—these errors assume diverse faces: pantheism, moralism, egotism, subjectivism, transcendentalism, Platonism, Puritanism, and utopianism; 2) avoiding these illusions in such a way as to keep the spiritual door open as a form of life to be lived out in an honest fashion; 3) recognizing the natural origin of these temptations and asking oneself what moves humans to succumb imperceptibly to these mistakes, at times tragic, at others comical, and what precautions one can take to remain cognizant of the deceitful leaps that can hijack one’s life; and 4) proposing as an alternative the radical distinction between essence and existence, which leads him to distinguish four realms of being: the realm of essence, the realm of matter, the realm of truth, and the realm of spirit. Essence as logical identity, matter as contingent existence, truth as frozen history, and spirit as the flames that part from contingency and approximate the eternal. An attempt has been made in this book to expand on and clarify these questions.

Character and Opinion in the United States

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351529382
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis Character and Opinion in the United States by : George Santayana

Download or read book Character and Opinion in the United States written by George Santayana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers. Because of his broad-ranging interests and lack of any permanent home in one particular country, he has often been stereotyped as a meditative philosopher removed from the world, living in what he himself called the "realm of spirit" among eternal essences. While there is some truth in this characterization, it is also true that Santayana was a penetrating analyst and critic of contemporary societies.'Character and Opinion in the United States' is his comprehensive critique of American thought and civilization and reflects the detached cosmopolitan perspective that lent his criticism its characteristic objectivity and strength. Santayana's subject here is the conflict of materialism and idealism in American life. In his view there exists a dualism in the American mind: One side, dealing with religion, literature, philosophy, and morality, tended to stay with inherited, old doctrines-the genteel tradition-and failed to keep pace with the other, practical side and its new developments in industry, invention, and social organization. Santayana traces the first mentality to Calvinism and its sense of sin, an attitude out of keeping with a new civilization and the dominance of practical interests. As a consequence of separating philosophy from everyday life, its study merely served religious and moral interests cut off from the free search for truth. At the heart of the book is Santayana's examination of the influential thought of William James and Josiah Royce, who typified for him the dilemma of American thought. The subordination of thought to social form and custom underlies Santayana's sharp critique of academic philosophy at Harvard where he early on studied and taught. He was disturbed by the very idea of philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy, he felt, should be an individual, original creation, "something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught" Santayana's analysis of how social imperatives may impede the pursuit of knowledge remains pertinent to contemporary intellectual debate. This volume ill be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and American studies specialists.

The Life of Reason

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262016745
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life of Reason by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Santayana's Life of Reason, published in five books from 1905 to 1906, ranks as one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Acknowledging the natural material bases of human life, Santayana traces the development of the human capacity for appreciating and cultivating the ideal. It is a capacity he exhibits as he articulates a continuity running through animal impulse, practical intelligence, and ideal harmony in reason, society, art, religion, and science. The work is an exquisitely rendered vision of human life lived sanely. In this first book of the work, Santayana provides an account of how the human animal develops instinct, passion, and chaotic experience into rationality and ideal life. Inspired by Aristotle's De Anima, Darwin's evolutionary theory, and William James's The Principles of Psychology, Santayana contends that the requirements of action in a hazardous and uncertain environment are the sources of the development of mind. More specifically, instinct and imagination are crucial to the emergence of reason from chaos. Separating himself from the typical thought of the time by his recognition of the imagination, Santayana in this volume offers extensive critiques of various philosophies of mind, including those of Kant and the British empiricists. This Critical Edition, volume VII of The Works of George Santayana, includes a chronology, notes, bibliography, textual commentary, lists of variants, and other tools useful to Santayana scholars.

Philosophical Opinion in America

Author : George Santayana
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 20 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophical Opinion in America by : George Santayana

Download or read book Philosophical Opinion in America written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

George Santayana (Ppr)

Author :
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1412824540
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (128 download)

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Book Synopsis George Santayana (Ppr) by :

Download or read book George Santayana (Ppr) written by and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve. Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell. Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism. John McCormick is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University, and an honorary fellow of English and other literatures at the University of York, England. He is the author of Seagoing: Memoirs, Bullfighting: Art, Technique, and Spanish Society, Fiction as Knowledge, American and European Literary Imagination, and Catastrophe and Imagination: English and American Writings from 1870 to 1950, all published by Transaction.

George Santayana

Author : Irving Singer
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300128533
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis George Santayana by : Irving Singer

Download or read book George Santayana written by Irving Singer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Santayana was unique in his contribution to American culture. For almost sixty years before his death in 1952, he combined literary and philosophical talents, writing not only important works of philosophy but also a best-selling novel, volumes of poetry, and much literary criticism. In this fascinating portrait of Santayana’s thought and complex personality, Irving Singer explores the full range of his harmonization of the literary and the philosophical. Singer shows how Santayana’s genius consisted in his imaginative ability to turn various types of personal alienation into creative elements that recur throughout his books. Singer points out that Santayana was a professional philosopher who addressed immediate problems of existence, a materialist in philosophy who believed in both a life of spirit and a life of reason, a product of American pragmatism who nevertheless rebelled against it, a Spaniard who wrote only in English, an American author who spent the last forty years of his life in different European countries. Against the grain of most twentieth-century philosophy, Santayana kept in view questions that matter to us all in our search for meaningful and satisfying lives.

The Sense of Beauty

Author : George Santayana
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.B/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sense of Beauty by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Sense of Beauty written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

George Santayana, Collection

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781499635669
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (356 download)

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Book Synopsis George Santayana, Collection by : George Santayana

Download or read book George Santayana, Collection written by George Santayana and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana (December 16, 1863 - September 26, 1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. His last will was to be buried in the Spanish Pantheon of the Cimitero Monumentale del Verano in Rome. Santayana is known for famous sayings, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Santayana is broadly included among the pragmatists with Harvard University colleagues William James and Josiah Royce. He said that he stood in philosophy "exactly where [he stood] in daily life." In this book: The Sense of Beauty, Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory Three Philosophical Poets, Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe Character and Opinion in the United States Winds Of Doctrine, Studies in Contemporary Opinion Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, Five Essays

The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, 1948-1952

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262195712
Total Pages : 730 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (621 download)

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Book Synopsis The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, 1948-1952 by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Letters of George Santayana, Book Eight, 1948-1952 written by George Santayana and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letters from the last years of Santayana's life, written as he completed Dominations and Powers, the final volume of his autobiography, and the one-volume abridgement of his early five-part masterwork, The Life of Reason. This final volume of Santayana's letters spans the last five years of the philosopher's life. Despite the increasing infirmities of age and illness, Santayana continued to be remarkably productive during these years, working steadily until September 1952, when he died of stomach cancer, just three months short of his eighty-ninth birthday. Still living in the nursing home run by the "Blue Sisters" of the Little Company of Mary in Rome (now with such prewar luxuries as hot baths and central heating restored), Santayana completed his book Dominations and Powers, which had been more than fifty years in the making, the final part of his autobiography Persons and Places, published posthumously in 1953 as My Host the World, and the abridgement of his early five-part masterwork, The Life of Reason, into a single volume--all while continuing to maintain a voluminous correspondence with friends and admirers. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Eight are written to such correspondents as the young American poet Robert Lowell (whom Santayana thinks of "only as a friend and not merely as a celebrity" and to whom he sends a wedding gift of $500); Ira D. Cardiff, the editor of Atoms of Thought, a collection of excerpts from Santayana's writings (which, Santayana complained, portrayed him as more akin to Tom Paine than Thomas Aquinas); Richard Colton Lyon, a young Texan who would later collect Santayana's writings about America in Santayana on America: Essays, Notes, and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy (1968); and the humanist philosopher Corliss Lamont.

Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107437644
Total Pages : 129 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (74 download)

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Download or read book Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy written by George Santayana and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1933, this book contains five philosophical essays by the famous philosopher and essayist George Santayana. The topics cover both older philosophy, such as those of Locke, as well as philosophy's relationship to newer discoveries, such as the theory of relativity. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in twentieth-century philosophy and the writings of Santayana.

The Life of Reason

Author : George Santayana
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life of Reason by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Sense of Beauty

Author : George Santayana
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351302787
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (513 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sense of Beauty by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Sense of Beauty written by George Santayana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From antiquity to the present, many have written on the subject of beauty, but precious few have done so with the capacity themselves to write beautifully. The Sense of Beauty is that rare exception. This remarkable early work of the great American philosopher, George Santayana, features a quality of prose that is as wondrous as what he had to say. Indeed, his summation remains a flawless classical statement. "Beauty seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Be'auty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good." The editor of this new edition, John McGormick, reminds us that The Sense of Beauty is the first work in aesthetics written in the United States. Santayana was versed in the history of his subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Taine in the nineteenth century. Santayana took as his task a complete rethinking of the idea that beauty is embedded in objects. Rather beauty is an emotion, a value, and a sense of the good. In this, aesthetics was unlike ethics: not a correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous. Rather it is a pleasure that resides in the sense of self. The work is divided into chapters on the materials of beauty, form and expression. A good many of Santayana's later works are presaged by this early effort. And this volume also anticipates the development of art as a movement as well as a value apart from other aspects of life. The work is written without posturing, without hectoring. Santayana is nonetheless able to give expression to strong views. His preferences are made perfectly plain. Perhaps the key is a powerful belief that beauty is an adornment not a material necessity. But that does mean art is trivial. Quite the contrary, the good life is precisely the extent to which such "adornments" as painting, poetry or music come to define the lives of individuals and civilizations alike. This is, in short, a major work that can still inform and move us a century after its first composition.