Santayana, George, originally Jorge August�n Nicol�s Ruiz de Santayana 1863-1952
Spanish-US philosopher, poet and novelist

Born in Madrid, and educated from 1872 in the USA, he taught at Harvard (from 1889) and was professor there (1907-12), but retained his Spanish citizenship and returned to Europe in 1912. He lived for some time in Oxford, but settled in Rome (1924) and spent his last years as the guest of a convent there. He is widely regarded as a literary philosopher and a fine stylist. His writing career began as a poet with Sonnets and Other Verses (1894). He was also a successful novelist with The Last Puritan (1935), anda cultivated literary critic, aesthetician and essayist. Philosophy, however, became his main interest, and his principles were eclectic in origin. His general outlook was naturalistic and materialistic, and he was critical of the transcendental claims of religion and of German idealism. He was also a sceptic, maintaining that knowledge of the external world depends on an act of 'animal faith'. But he was at the same time a Platonist in temperament and attitude, and was devoted to the institutions, if not the doctrines, of the Catholic Church. His philosophical works include The Sense of Beauty (1896), The Life of Reason (1905-06), Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), which is itself an introduction to the comprehensive Realms of Being (4 vols, 1927-40), Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927) and The Last Puritan (1935). He also wrote an autobiography, Persons and Places (3 vols, 1944-53).

Bibliography: W E Arnett, George Santayana (1968)