The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has generously supported the Santayana Edition since our beginning, is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
As part of the celebration, the NEH invites you to email them at neh50@neh.gov and share how NEH grants have made a difference in your career, research, or community.
Since Herman Saatkamp received an NEH planning grant in 1977 to determine the feasibility of editing The Works of George Santayana, the NEH has given over $1.5 million to the Santayana Edition in outright and matching funds.
We are extremely grateful for this long-standing support from the NEH. And we are thankful as well for your continued interest and commitment, which has demonstrated so clearly the significance of our work. We hope you will join us in letting the NEH know what their support of the Santayana Edition has meant and continues to mean to friends of the humanities.
Below is the letter the director of the Santayana Edition sent to the NEH:
To the National Endowment for the Humanities:
I am extremely grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for being committed to preserving and disseminating the philosophical heritage of the United States through grants for scholarly editions of writings by American philosophers. The NEH has supported work on critical editions of writings by Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James, Charles S. Peirce, Jane Addams, John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and George Santayana. These critical editions make available important writings in corrected and reliable texts that preserve the ideas of these thinkers for generations of readers interested in freedom, democracy, and imagination.
The NEH-supported projects that have most influenced my intellectual development and professional career are The Correspondence of William James; Collected Works of John Dewey; John Dewey Correspondence, 1881–1952; and The Works of George Santayana. I learned about critical editions from my teacher John J. McDermott, who was awarded NEH grants between 1988 and 2001 for The Correspondence of William James. I then studied John Dewey with Larry Hickman, Director of the Center for Dewey Studies and recipient of NEH grants between 1993 and 2004 for the John Dewey Correspondence, 1881–1952. The Collected Works of John Dewey, which has been and remains hugely important for my thinking, was edited by Jo Ann Boydston, who received NEH grants between 1972 and 1990. Later, I went to work for Herman Saatkamp and Marianne Wokeck at the Santayana Edition. The NEH awarded grants to Saatkamp between 1977 and 1999 and to Wokeck between 2003 and 2011 for The Works of George Santayana. Presently I direct the Santayana Edition, and we are pleased to have received a grant from the NEH in 2011 to continue our work.
The texts produced by these projects have taught me how philosophical reflection may be more than a game or professional activity, and how it may be a way of life. The notion of philosophy as a way of life is, of course, ancient. But these thinkers realized that living philosophically means different things in different conditions; and they articulated visions of reflective living in American conditions where inherited ideals and material conditions often conflict, where tradition and change each can—seemingly simultaneously—threaten injustice and promise liberation, where the human situation is precarious and the potential for the humanities enormous. They knew tradition was indispensible but not unimpeachable, and they envisioned philosophy as engaged with problems in a material world and serving freedom in an uncertain universe. This informs my understanding of critical editing as preserving texts not for their own sake but for what they contribute to ongoing problem solving. And I have learned that completing a critical editing project requires a community, whose efforts can produce texts that in turn create critical and intellectual communities dedicated to freedom and imagination. This idea of community as vital to the creative renewal of tradition on behalf of freedom is consistent with the philosophical perspectives of James, Dewey, and Santayana (even when acknowledging their differing conceptions and estimations of community). As both a student and a teacher, I have experienced the communities creating and created by critical editions, and it has made a huge difference in my life. In my work with the Santayana Edition in particular, I have been greatly enriched by relationships with both senior scholars and new students becoming acquainted with rich textual traditions. I deeply appreciate the NEH’s commitment to these most vital American traditions.
Cordially,
Martin A. Coleman
Published on: March 14, 2015