Santayana on Beauty

Abstract

Santayana is often ignored by analytic philosophers as a “merely literary” figure, and until recently relatively little serious work has been done to explicate his views. It was his misfortune that he wrote so supremely well that his work was often classified as literature “rather than” as philosophy both by literary critics and (pejoratively) by philosophers. Yet he did hold important and original views on many of the topics which occupy philosophers to this day; he was in touch with all the philosophical concerns current through his long lifetime; and his observations upon the writings of other philosophers bear witness to an analytical capacity which cuts through rhetoric to the crux of what a writer is saying, with his own precisely articulated view as the vantage point for his analysis. This is not to imply that there are no shifts, particularly between his earlier and his later work. But these shifts are in the nature of adjustments rather than complete turnabouts or contradictions.