Scepticism and Animal Faith by George Santayana
In this work, Santayana analyzes the nature of the knowing process and demonstrates by means of clear, powerful arguments how we know and what validates our knowledge. The central concept of his philosophy is found in a careful discrimination between the awareness of objects independent of our perception and the awareness of essences attributed to objects by our mind, or between what Santayana calls the realm of existents and the realm of subsistents. Since we can never be certain that these attributes actually inhere in a substratum of existents, skepticism is established as a form of belief, but animal faith is shown to be a necessary quality of the human mind. Without this faith there could be no rational approach to the necessary problem of understanding and surviving in this world.Santayana derives this practical philosophy from a wide and fascinating variety of sources. He considers critically the positions of such philosophers as Descartes, Euclid, Hume, Kant, Parmenides, Plato, Pythagoras, Schopenhauer, and the Buddhist school as well as the assumptions made by the ordinary man in everyday situations. Such matters as the nature of belief, the rejection of classical idealism, the nature of intuition and memory, symbols and myth, mathematical reality, literary psychology, the discovery of essence, sublimation of animal faith, the implied being of truth, and many others are given detailed analyses in individual chapters.
GEORGE SANTAYANA was born on December 16, 1863, in Madrid, Spain. His mother took him to Boston, Massachusetts, when his parents divorced nine years later, in 1872, where he attended the elite Boston Latin School and Harvard College. Santayana spent two years studying in Berlin after graduating from Harvard in 1886, but he returned to the United States to seek a PhD in philosophy at Harvard, where he studied under William James. Santayana went on to teach at a university after completing his degree. But, in 1912, the philosopher received a bequest from his mother's inheritance, allowing him to stop teaching.
He proceeded to Europe, first stopping in London and then Paris before settling in Rome. He stayed there until September 26, 1952, when he died. Santayana was a poet, literary critic, and philosopher who made substantial contributions to aesthetics, primarily through the publication of The Sense of Beautiful (1896), his first major work in this field, which concentrates on humanity's creative life rather than the underlying structures of reality or humankind's techniques of perceiving reality. The Life of Reason (5 vols., 1905-1906), Santayana's most famous work, continues and expands on this idea.
In, Santayana kept a naturalistic approach. Everything ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural has an ideal growth, according to all of his literature. Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and the Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927-1940), as well as his highly praised novel The Last Puritan (1935) and his autobiography, People and Places (3 vols., 1944-1953), are only a few of Santayana's other writings.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781684223725 |
| ISBN 10 | 1684223725 |
| Title | Scepticism and Animal Faith |
| Author | George Santayana |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Martino Fine Books |
| Year published | 2019-07-25 |
| Number of pages | 330 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |