George Santayana

George Santayana was a Spanish-born philosopher, poet, novelist and critic who grew up in Boston and taught at Harvard from 1889 to 1912. He then left the United States for Europe, settling finally in Rome. The Sense of Beauty, his first major book, defines beauty as 'pleasure objectified': a pleasure we experience as a quality of the thing. His five-volume The Life of Reason traces how reason shapes society, religion, art and science, and his later work joins naturalism with a view of religion as poetry. He is also remembered for the line 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'.

Key ideas

• Beauty is 'pleasure objectified': pleasure we experience as a quality of the object.
• Everything arises from matter, yet mind, art and religion give life its ideal meanings.
• Thoroughgoing scepticism cannot be refuted, so belief in the external world rests on 'animal faith'.
• Religions are best understood as poetry expressing moral ideals, not as literal truth.

Major works

• The Sense of Beauty (1896)
• The Life of Reason (1905–1906)
• Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
• Realms of Being (1927–1940)
• The Last Puritan (1935)

In the Book corner

• The Sense of Beauty 1896 · Intermediate
  Santayana's first philosophical book, subtitled Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory, written from his lectures on aesthetics at Harvard. It offers a…

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