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All critical editions approved by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE) are required to begin with an extensive historical, biographical, and bibliographical study on the subject. The editorial references are listed above, but there are many things that go into editorial materials and the critical edition as a whole. Other references include …

The editors prepare an exact computer transcript of the copy-text that includes Santayana’s revisions rooted in the text with brackets. The transcription is cross-checked against photocopies twice and the original manuscript once. The revisions are taken from the transcription and placed in a list of authorial changes. However, the alterations that show Santayana’s composition process …

The copy-text is the form of the text that is closest to the author’s own hand (having not been edited or reworded by others) which is in its most complete form. Emending is done with the editors can verify authorial changes as wll as when there are clear grammatical errors or improper spellings. Read more

The recorded variations are used to compare the publications and nonpublication of the text as a way of reconstructing the stages of composition and publication. We then analyze the textual history of the work to choose which form of the test will be the underlying form of the critical edition (the copy-text). Read more

The purpose of having multiple versions of a text is to be able to compare (collate) them in order to sort out authorial changes from editorial, typist, or compositor changes. The documents gathered during the Genealogical Research Process (especially correspondence) can help distinguish the source of the changes with the test. All copies of the …

Search for and collect all other materials related to the text; for example, related materials may include source materials and correspondence that mentions the text. The Santayana Edition has a photocopy of every known artifact related to Santayana’s work. Read more

Locate and collect all versions of the text e.g. holograph manuscript, typescript, printers’ proofs, two or more editions, and multiple impressions of editions. Our illustrations here will be based on our own work in progress: Santayana’s Reason in Science. Read more

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).