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George Santayana (1863–1952)

Teoksen The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory tekijä

111+ teosta 3,310 jäsentä 23 arvostelua 9 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

A gentle philosopher-poet, born and reared in Spain, educated at Harvard University and later professor of philosophy there, George Santayana resided in England, France, and Italy after 1914. At the beginning of World War II, he entered the nursing home in Rome managed by nuns known as the Blue näytä lisää Sisters and remained there until his death. His last book, The Poet's Testament (1953), contains a few unpublished lyrics, several translations, and two plays in blank verse. The title comes from the poem read at his funeral, which begins: "I give back to the earth what the earth gave/All to the furrow, nothing to the grave." Santayana wrote philosophy in an inimitable prose, enriched with imagery and metaphor. His meanings were always complex and often ironic. In this style, so untypical of the professionalized philosophy common in the English-speaking world during his lifetime, Santayana nevertheless articulated an epistemological critical realism and an ontology of essence and matter that drew the attention and admiration of philosophers and scholars. His first published philosophical book, The Sense of Beauty (1896), was an important contribution in aesthetics, a classic text that is still in use. His multivolume work The Life of Reason expresses his naturalistic philosophy of history and culture. It states the essence of his attitude toward nature, life, and society. Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) presents his theory of knowledge and also serves as an introduction to his system of philosophy, Realms of Being (1927--40). The titles of the separate volumes of this remarkable work, now out of print, reveal the lineaments of his system: Realm of Essence (1927), Realm of Matter (1930), Realm of Truth (1937), and Realm of Spirit (1940). His ideas were "popularized" in his only novel, The Last Puritan, which became a surprise bestseller overnight. According to the New York Times, "He came into a changing American scene with a whole group of concepts that enormously enriched our thinking. He gave a moving vitality to what had often been obscure abstractions . . . he made the whole relationship of reason and beauty, each to the other, come alive and stay alive." Although Santayana's Complete Poems (1975) is out of print, several volumes of his poetry are available and are listed below. Publication of The Complete Works of George Santayana, under the general editorship of Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., is in progress. Conforming to the guidelines of a critical edition, The Complete Works is a long-range multivolume project of which a few volumes have already appeared to critical acclaim. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
Image credit: 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. (wikipedia.org)

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Tekijän teokset

The Life of Reason (1905) 215 kappaletta
Three Philosophical Poets (1910) 185 kappaletta
Persons and places (1777) 155 kappaletta
The Philosophy of Santayana (1936) 103 kappaletta
Reason in religion (1905) 60 kappaletta
Reason in Art: The Life of Reason (1714) 55 kappaletta
Dialogues in Limbo (1664) 49 kappaletta
The middle span (1944) 43 kappaletta
Realms of being (1942) 27 kappaletta
The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings (2009) — Tekijä — 25 kappaletta
Poems (1901) 24 kappaletta
My host the world (1953) 20 kappaletta
The letters of George Santayana (1955) 19 kappaletta
The Wisdom of George Santayana (1950) 18 kappaletta
Egotism in German Philosophy (1916) 17 kappaletta
Animal faith and spiritual life (1967) — Tekijä — 15 kappaletta
Platonism and the Spiritual Life (2006) 13 kappaletta
The realm of essence (2010) 12 kappaletta
The realm of truth (1937) 11 kappaletta
Sonnets and other verses (1906) 9 kappaletta
The Poet's Testament (1953) 8 kappaletta
The realm of matter (1930) 8 kappaletta
The works of George Santayana (1936) 6 kappaletta
Lotze's system of philosophy (1971) 2 kappaletta
O sentimento da beleza (2019) 2 kappaletta
George Santayana THE SENSE OF BEAUTY Modern Library (1777) — Tekijä — 2 kappaletta
[No title] 1 kappale
Goethe's Faust 1 kappale

Associated Works

The Age of Analysis: The 20th Century Philosophers (1955) — Avustaja — 404 kappaletta
Critical Theory Since Plato (1971) — Avustaja, eräät painokset398 kappaletta
The Portable Conservative Reader (1982) — Avustaja — 210 kappaletta
World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It (1918) — Avustaja — 190 kappaletta
A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry (1929) — Avustaja — 128 kappaletta
The Standard Book of British and American Verse (1932) — Avustaja — 114 kappaletta
Soul: An Archaeology--Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles (1994) — Avustaja — 101 kappaletta
Twentieth-Century American Poetry (1777) — Avustaja — 96 kappaletta
American Sonnets: An Anthology (2007) — Avustaja — 65 kappaletta
Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (1935) — Esipuhe, eräät painokset54 kappaletta
The Range of Philosophy: Introductory Readings (1964) — Avustaja — 52 kappaletta
Modern Essays (1921) — Avustaja — 33 kappaletta
Classic Essays in English (1961) — Avustaja — 22 kappaletta
Great companions : critical memoirs of some famous friends (1959) — Avustaja — 22 kappaletta
Time to Be Young: Great Stories of the Growing Years (1945) — Avustaja — 7 kappaletta

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laplantelibrary | Dec 11, 2021 |
It has been said this was the author's only novel. It may have been a novel, but read more like a book on philosophy and morality. I started this book in 2019 and just finished the last third. I believe that this work by Santayana went way over my head. On the surface, it is the story of Oliver, a very confused young lad and young man as well. Every area of his life is filled with doubts. He wants to escape these doubts and be free, but I don't think he ever will. What the higher meaning is, I have no idea. From the title, I originally thought this would be a Puritan life in New England; I was wrong! 794 pages… (lisätietoja)
½
 
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Tess_W | 5 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jun 19, 2021 |
I read this some time ago in trying to improve my writing skills. It lived up to what I expected, and then some.
 
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LGCullens | Jun 1, 2021 |
Summary: A philosophical discussion of the nature of beauty, grounding it in the pleasure of the perceiver with an object and its associations.

Classically, philosophy has spoken of three transcendentals: Truth (logic), Goodness (ethics), and Beauty (aesthetics). To satisfy the requirements of tenure at Harvard, George Santayana wrote this book, based on lectures, to offer his own outline of an aesthetic theory in what was his first book. Perhaps the most striking move of Santayana was to move beauty from the realm of the transcendental to that of human perception of value in the object perceived. He contrasts physical pleasure, focused on the organ of sensation, with aesthetic sensation, focused on the object from which pleasure arises. He defines beauty as "pleasure objectified."

He then explores this sense of beauty under three headings: the materials of beauty, form, and expression. The materials of beauty focus on the various human senses, chiefly sight, hearing, memory and imagination, through which perception and appreciation of objects occur. Form has to do with both external realities that give rise to sensation and their mental representation. He explores aspects of these that produce pleasure including symmetry, uniformity, and multiplicity, and also the idea of "indeterminate" forms such as landscapes that derive their beauty from the perceptive interpretation of the observe. Finally, Santayana explores the nature of expression which means the qualities one associates with an object. This suggests that one's sense of beauty develops from immediate perception to a deeper perception where past experience, imagination, and other associations shape the kind of aesthetic pleasure one has in the object.

Santayana elaborates each of these elements in a discussion that is highly abstract, that I won't attempt to outline or summarize here. What troubles me in his treatment, which seems to me a sophisticated way of saying, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," is the elimination of the transcendent aspects of beauty. For those who sense beyond perceived beauty an author of beauty, Santayana would say this is simply one's sense experience, and one's sense of the sublime is simply ecstatic pleasure. There is nothing "beyond" to which beauty points. The sehnsucht or longing that C.S. Lewis writes of in Surprised by Joy when listening to Wagner, or glimpsing a scene in nature, to Santayana signifies nothing more than the interplay between object and sense eventuating in aesthetic pleasure. When Bono says, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for," Santayana might reply, "and you never will. All you may find is what you are looking at."

I find myself wondering how much Santayana's aesthetic has shaped both the making of and the appreciation of art. How might artists pursue their work differently when they do not compose and paint, write and dance, with the object of "Soli Deo Gloria" and instead see their work as evoking aesthetic pleasure in those who partake of them. How are we changed as we are discouraged, when experiencing what we might call the "transcendent" in a work to think of it as nothing more than a confluence of the material of our senses, the form of a work, and its expressive associations. What happens when wonder is turned inward, rather than upward?

These were some of the questions I was left with on reading Santayana.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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BobonBooks | Dec 9, 2019 |

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