5 Lessons from George Santayana

By: Oswald Sobrino

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) was a student of William James at Harvard University and a contemporary of John Dewey, but Santayana was not part of American Pragmatism. Santayana created his own original and distinctive view of philosophy flavored by his European cultural background (born in Spain, but raised and educated as an American). The great historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston, S.J., places Santayana in the school of critical realism, one of several reactions to the idealist philosophy influential in nineteenth-century America and Britain. I draw five lessons from Santayana's book Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923). Santayana's title is an accurate summary of the book's contents: he spends several chapters presenting his thorough-going scepticism with scholastic exactitude which is then followed by his (in my view, more pleasant) exposition of animal faith, the active faith by which we live in ordinary life. As is customary in this series, I invite readers to use my book as an invitation to sample the many other works by the prolific Santayana.