n.
orig. Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santillana
born Dec. 16, 1863, Madrid, Spain
died Sept. 26, 1952, Rome, Italy
Spanish-born U.S. philosopher, poet, and humanist.
Santayana moved to the U.S. as a boy in 1872. After graduating from Harvard, he taught philosophy there (with William James and Josiah Royce ) from 1889 to 1912, and he began producing important contributions to aesthetics, speculative philosophy, and literary criticism, including The Sense of Beauty (1896), Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), and The Life of Reason (190506). He returned to Europe in 1912. Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) best conveys his theory of immediately apprehended essences and describes the role played by "animal faith" in various forms of knowledge. He also wrote a novel, The Last Puritan (1935), and an autobiography, Persons and Places , 3 vol. (194453).