biography
| name: |
Santayana, George
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originally Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
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pronunciation:
[santayahna]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1863–1952)
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| biography:
| Philosopher, poet, essayist, and novelist, born in Madrid, Spain. He spent his childhood from the age of 3 to 16 in Ávila, but moved to Boston in 1872, studied with William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, and at 26 was appointed professor of philosophy at Harvard (1889–1912). Among his students were T S Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Felix Frankfurter. His first book was Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), and he continued to compose formally perfect, reflective verse throughout his long life. But he first achieved a reputation with The Sense of Beauty (1896), declared by Muensterberg to be the finest work on aesthetics published in the USA. He then published Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900) and the important philosophical work The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress (1905). Three Philosophical Poets (1910) dealt with Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Hating academic life and American commercialism and Puritanism, he took advantage of a modest inheritance to retire in 1912, and left the USA to live a solitary life in Oxford, Paris, and (after 1925) Rome. He wrote 18 volumes of philosophy, chief among them The Life of Reason (5 vols, 1905–6) and The Realms of Being (4 vols, 1927–40). His philosophical works are distinguished by their lucid, literary style, and in addition he published poetry, literary and cultural criticism, and a three-volume autobiography. A novel, The Last Puritan (1935), about Cambridge, MA society, was an unexpected best-seller. |
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