Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Santayana

  • The Pleasures of the Mountain Bike

    What follows is from my first weblog, and is dated 4 May 2004. The photo was taken this morning by Dennis Murray, fellow aficionado of strenuous pursuits. ………………… Time was, when running was my exercise, the daily bread of my cardiovascular system. But then the injuries came: chondromalacia patellae in both knees, shin splints, plantar…

  • Putin’s Sudetenland?

    It occurred to me this morning that there is an ominous parallel between  Putin's occupation of the Ukraine and Hitler's of the Sudetenland, and on a similar pretext, namely, the protecting of ethnic Russians/Germans.  The Sudetenland was the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia whose annexation by Hitler in 1938 was part of the run-up to the…

  • What Exists Exists

    Reflecting on the seeming tautology, 'What exists exists,' Jacques Maritain writes, This is no tautology, it implies an entire metaphysics.  What is posited outside its causes exercises an activity, an energy which is existence itself.  To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the…

  • Blanshard on Santayana’s Prose Style

    Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.   The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused toadopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To…

  • Santayana on Americans and Socialism

    George Santayana (1863-1952), Character and Opinion in the United States (Norton, 1967), p. 171: His instinct [the American's] is to think well of everybody, and to  wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has…

  • The Philosopher as Rhinoceros

    George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 35: So long as philosophy is the free pursuit of wisdom, it arises wherever men of character and penetration, each with his special experience or hobby, looks about them in this world. That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and…

  • George Santayana on the Three Traps that Strangle Philosophy

    From Animal Faith and Spiritual Life, ed. John Lachs, Meredith, 1967, p. 168: There are three traps that strangle philosophy: the Church, the marriage-bed, and the professor's chair. I escaped from the first in my youth; the second I never entered, and as soon as possible I got out of the third. Perhaps we could…