From Soliloquies in England (1922): Santayana was part of a world that was rubbing its eyes after the end of what they called the Great War, wondering what it all meant and where civilization can go from here. The moment produced some fine (one might even say 'stellar') intellectual work. Hold that metaphor. Santayana, in Soliloquies , gave us this aphorism. "It would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine by its own light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with which to profit by the light other bodies are shedding: whereas, so long as it was itself on fire, no part of it could see." What does that mean? I think I know, at least vaguely. And it is a better piece of work than some other famous Santayana quotes, including the condemned-to-repeat-it thing. On one level, Santayana means here what he says. When earth (and possibly other analogous planets) cooled a bit it became a host for life, and some of the lives made possible by this contain eyes capable ...
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"Perhaps there is no source of things at all, no simpler form from which they have evolved, but only an endless succession of different complexities." # GeorgeSantayana # philosophy Perhaps, indeed. In modern terms, perhaps the multiverse exists in a steady-state, so that the original steady-state theorists, those of Hoyle's heyday, were wrong only by being parochial. Such a new steady-state theory would hold that a big bang in one universe is the collapse of a star in on itself, the creation of a black hole or singularity, in another universe. Thus, universes give birth to one another and the whole system of which they are all a part needs no beginning and cannot be expected to have an end.
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy a famous/infamous work by George Santayana. a link: courtesy of Columbia University library. I won't argue with GS in this entry, I'll simply present his complaint against the tradition in question. This complaint was that three very conflicting strands made up this philosophy, which exists by fudging the differences among those strands. The "genteel tradition" in the US in the late 19th century consisted of one part Calvinist Christianity, one part Darwinian evolution, and one part Hegelian idealism. Darwin was taken as having provided empirical support for the dialectical progression to which Hegel gave world-constituting significance, and both were taken to vindicate the Reformation. The churches in the U.S.in Emerson's day, Santayana says, had left any rigorous adherence to Calvinism behind, but they had nothing else on offer philosophically except "a selection or a new emphasis on parts of what Calv...
Last week, in a post about Santayana, I said by way of admitting my own prejudices, "I find reasonable an act of 'will to believe' in a God whose existence I can not prove, as part of my effort to lead a productive and satisfying life on earth." A friend wrote me immediately that he was surprised by this rather modest confession of faith. He said he thought the phrase "whose existence I can not prove" was rather misleading, since it suggests that I may have some evidence of God's existence, though it is evidence inadequate to clear the bar of proof. He thought "for whose existence I have no evidence at all" would be a more frank statement of the epistemological situation. My reply: I do believe that I have evidence that God exists that falls short of proof, so I don't agree that I was cheating with the phrase "whose existence I cannot prove." The evidence is human subjectivity itself, the stream of consciousness. It rem...
A participant in Yahoo!Answers asks: "Who is the best atheist philosopher? Out of Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Democritus, etc. who is the greatest/best atheist philosopher of all time?" I answered thus: ----------------------------------------------- Since you've said "etc." I guess we can move beyond your list. I have to answer: George Santayana. A word of bias acknowledged: I'm a Jamesian pragmatist in philosophy myself, and I find reasonable an act of "will to believe" in a God whose existence I can not prove, as part of my effort to lead a productive and satisfying life on earth. But you didn't ask for best fideist. You asked for best atheist. And Santayana, who was something of a protégé of James, became that. He combined Plato in matters of value with Democritus in matters of existence, a fascinating combination. Here's a quote: "Now I was aware, at first in...