George Santayana, (Madrid 1863-Rome 1952), was one of the most representative philosophers of the 20th century, and is now recognized as one of the precursors of the thought of our time. Linked by his family ties to the Spanish language and the Catholic religion, he was educated at Harvard, where he was a professor for more than twenty years and one of the founders of pragmatism. He was also a poet from his youth, an internationally successful novelist, literary critic, and Nobel candidate.
He knew how to combine rigorous respect for matter with an inalienable aspiration to the spirit, tradition with self-transcendence, moving away at all times from the anguish and despair that marked the thinking of his contemporaries. A cheerful and intrepid designer, he managed to express in his adopted English language a demand for open rationality and realism. This Anthology of the Spirit faithfully covers all the stages of his work and makes translation the lingua franca of his reading, revealing to us the most important sections of the work of one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Santayana would not be in any way a Spanish philosopher, as he never was an American philosopher, but rather an author open to the universal.
Antonio Lastra (Valencia, 1967) is a PhD in Philosophy, external researcher at the Franklin Institute for Research in North American Thought at the University of Alcalá and academic director of La Torre del Virrey, Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies. His fields of work are the ecology of culture, translation as lingua franca, theological-political problems, English literature and cinema. His latest book is The Imperial Theme (Ápeiron Ediciones, 2023).
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George Santayana
Antología del espíritu
Miscelánea
WORK INFORMATION
Colección Obra Fundamental
Edited in 2023
23 x 16 cm
507 págs.
Binding: hard cover
Language: spanish
ISBN: 978-84-17264-37-6
“Santayana said in English being Spanish what no Spaniard said in our language. A Santayana reading is therapeutic, it is healing, it has the gift of making the spirit something better ”.
Here you can listen and download a series of podcasts that include a selection of Santayana's main titles collected in this "Anthology of the Spirit", and the essence of his thought:
Metanoia in Greek means, among other things, "change of mind" and for Santayana "the end of youth" represents the end of an era where his correspondence, biographical passages and sublime mini-essays such as Contempt for the World fit.
Santayana makes a masterful and admiring sentimental portrait of the great American poet and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, while paying homage to the poet-philosophers who have been in the world.
We extract fragments from Plotinus and the nature of evil (1912), one of the most enduring concerns of the great Spanish thinker, and from Skepticism and animal faith (1923), a book where he developed the theory of access to freely expressed spiritual life.
Uniting the Greek classics, such as Plato, with everyday life was one of Santayana's dreams. His essay Platonism and Spiritual Life (1927) tells us about it, as well as his extraordinary book The Kingdoms of Being (1940), one of the great volumes of contemporary philosophy.
Santayana's experiences and memories in relation to Spain, his family, religion, his philosophy, the great and the small in the spirit are present in General Confession (1937). We also collect texts On dominations and powers, a social and government treatise ahead of its time.
This is one last tour (1949) of Santayana through who and where in his life, trails that come and go with a refined literary style that season these autobiographical passages from which we collect some episodes.
Listen to Fernando Savater and Antonio Lastra, two renowned philosophers from different generations, talk about George Santayana, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century in our time.
Also available in video.
