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Different variations of this question, pertaining to his religious beliefs, preoccupied people when he was alive; but Catholics particularly seem to be interested in it, and he is still referred to occasionally as a “Catholic philosopher.” Santayana suggested to biographer Bruno Lind that he wanted to avoid “replacing Aristotle as the accepted pagan philosopher for …

Despite widespread claims that Santayana authored the verse from which this line is taken, we found no evidence among his published and unpublished work to verify this. See The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition, edited by William G. Holzberger, (Bucknell University Press, 1979). In 2014 a researcher named Randolph Wagner discovered that …

Yes. See Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, “Tipperary” (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922).

The oft quoted and commonly misunderstood line appears in Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of the five-volume Life of Reason. In the 1905 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition, it is found on page 284. In context, he is making a psychological point, that is, he is observing something about the development of human intelligence. …

At a young age Santayana traveled, with his father, from Spain to the United States to join his mother and half siblings in Boston. Santayana was educated in the U.S. at the Boston Latin School and Harvard University and later became a professor of philosophy at Harvard. He wrote all of his philosophical works in …