About
George Santayana, born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana in Madrid in 1863, was a Spanish-American philosopher and writer. He moved to Boston in 1872, studied at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in 1889 and taught philosophy until 1912. A leading figure in classical American philosophy, he developed a naturalism infused with creative imagination. His major work, The Life of Reason (1905-1906), contains his famous aphorism: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' He also wrote the bestselling novel The Last Puritan (1935) and his autobiography Persons and Places (1944). He settled in Rome in 1924, where he died in 1952.
* 1863-12-16 — † 1952-09-26
Major works
- The Sense of Beauty (1896)essay
- The Life of Reason (1905-1906)philosophical work
- Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)philosophical work
- The Last Puritan (1935)novel
- Persons and Places (1944)autobiography
Key milestones
- 1889Earned his PhD at Harvard with a dissertation on Rudolf Hermann Lotze.
- 1912Retired from Harvard after an inheritance and moved to Europe.
- 1936Appeared on the cover of Time magazine (February 3).
Themes
NaturalismCreative imaginationReason and lifeScepticism and animal faithMemory and history
Sources: plato.stanford.edu · iep.utm.edu · britannica.com