Word: santayana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...death, George Santayana '86 is a somewhat ambiguous figure, surround by the usual complement of myth and legend...
...while he was teaching at Harvard he made himself something of a recluse--his complete intellectual detachment (which provoked Bertrand Russell to call him a "cold fish"), and his unrelenting, uncompromising attacks on many of his associates in the field of philosophy tend slightly to obscure the view of Santayana, or at any rate, to give a rather unsympathetic...
Henry D. Aiken associate professor of Philosophy, said that "For anyone who, like myself, professes to be a liberal, Santayana must inevitably be an ambiguous figure. I honor his naturalism, his devotion to the life of reason, his imaginative humanism. As a literary psychologist, he is exciting and profound. As a philosophical critic of literature and life on a dozen levels, he is penetrating and often wise...
...disdain for the parochialism and vulgarity of America is sobering. Anyone who, like myself, loves Harvard, must inevitably be shaken by the fact that Santayana found Harvard merely genteel and grubby a cultural backwash...
...Santayana, as Bertrand Russell once said, was a 'cold fish.' He lacks the saving qualities of generosity and love. It goes without saying, of course, that Santayana is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Yet somehow one says this grudglugly, without affection. Just why, it is hand...