Santayana was brought to Boston at the age of eight. He was educated at the Boston Public Latin School and attended Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees where he studied with William James and Josiah Royce.
Upon receiving his doctorate, he joined his former teachers in the faculty and rose to professor of philosophy. Santayana remained there until 1912, when, with the aid of a small inheritance, he left the USA for Europe. He spent some time in England but in 1924 settled in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life.
A noted stylist, Santayana presented his earlier philosophical views in the four volumes of The Life of Reason (1905 – 06). He rejected the idealism current at the Harvard of his student days and presented instead a naturalistic account of reality, consciousness, and values.
In 1923, Santayana published Skepticism and Animal Faith, generally considered the inaugural work of his mature naturalist philosophy. The four volumes of The Realms of Being (1927 – 40), Santayana sought to develop his views.
Adopting an initial position of doubt, he was led to conclude that while we could always doubt that anything exists we were still compelled to accept that we were aware for certain essences.
On the basis of these essences, it was possible to pass to the world of existence but, Santayana insisted, we could never be aware of this world in the same direct way in which we were aware of the world essences. Santayana also wished to argue for the existence of the realm of spirit, although, unlike the realms of matter, he argued, it lacked all power.
The spirit of Santayana’s philosophy was summarized in his early book, The Sense of Beauty (1896), when he writes; To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by contemplation of nature to a vivid faith is the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
Santayana was also known for his poetry and for his bestselling novel The Last Puritan (1935).
George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
