30 Facts About George Santayana

Jorge Agustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana y Borras, known in English as George Santayana, was a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist.

At the age of 48, George Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently.

George Santayana was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's life and thought, and in many respects was a devoted Spinozist.

George Santayana was born on December 16,1863, in Madrid and spent his early childhood in Avila, Spain.

George Santayana lived in Boston for a few years following her husband's death in 1857; in 1861, she moved with her three surviving children to Madrid.

In 1869, Josefina Borras de George Santayana returned to Boston with her three Sturgis children, because she had promised her first husband to raise the children in the US.

George Santayana left the six-year-old Jorge with his father in Spain.

George Santayana's father, finding neither Boston nor his wife's attitude to his liking, soon returned alone to Avila, and remained there the rest of his life.

George Santayana attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he studied under the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce and was involved in eleven clubs as an alternative to athletics.

George Santayana was founder and president of the Philosophical Club, a member of the literary society known as the OK.

George Santayana then returned to Harvard to write his dissertation on Hermann Lotze.

From 1896 to 1897, George Santayana studied at King's College, Cambridge.

Housman, and his friendships with people who were openly homosexual and bisexual, has led scholars to speculate that George Santayana was perhaps homosexual or bisexual, but it remains unclear whether he had any actual heterosexual or homosexual relationships.

In 1912, George Santayana resigned his position at Harvard to spend the rest of his life in Europe.

George Santayana had saved money and been aided by a legacy from his mother.

In later life, George Santayana was financially comfortable, in part because his 1935 novel, The Last Puritan, had become an unexpected best-seller.

George Santayana's one novel, The Last Puritan, is a Bildungsroman, centering on the personal growth of its protagonist, Oliver Alden.

George Santayana wrote books and essays on a wide range of subjects, including philosophy of a less technical sort, literary criticism, the history of ideas, politics, human nature, morals, the influence of religion on culture and social psychology, all with considerable wit and humor.

George Santayana wrote poems and a few plays, and left ample correspondence, much of it published only since 2000.

George Santayana is usually considered an American writer, although he declined to become an American citizen, resided in Fascist Italy for decades, and said that he was most comfortable, intellectually and aesthetically, at Oxford University.

George Santayana believed that human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment.

George Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius.

George Santayana believed superior races should be discouraged from "intermarriage with inferior stock".

George Santayana is remembered in large part for his aphorisms, many of which have been so frequently used as to have become cliched.

Santayana influenced those around him, including Bertrand Russell, whom Santayana single-handedly steered away from the ethics of G E Moore.

George Santayana influenced many prominent people such as Harvard students T S Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Walter Lippmann, W E B Du Bois, Conrad Aiken, Van Wyck Brooks, Felix Frankfurter, Max Eastman, Wallace Stevens.

George Santayana is quoted by the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman as a central influence in the thesis of his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Religious historian Jerome A Stone credits Santayana with contributing to the early thinking in the development of religious naturalism.

George Santayana's passing is referenced in the lyrics to singer-songwriter Billy Joel's 1989 music single, "We Didn't Start the Fire".

Unmodernized, critical editions of George Santayana's published and unpublished writing.