This book studies the philosophical work of George Santayana and the nature of his work's relationship with that of American philosopher William James. James is consistently dismissive of “the ‘all is vanity’ state of mind,” which arguably represents the opposite of America’s activist, progressive ideals. The Spanish Santayana made the overcoming of vanity, or detachment central to his “vital philosophy,” which he had to gradually “disentangle” from the forces he found at work in America. This book, then, traces Santayana’s intricate response to James, from its earliest expression in Interpretations, to his later Realms. Rather than attempt to arrive at a final interpretation of either one’s philosophy, Antonio Rionda emphasizes what James refers to as the hotspot of each one’s thinking: James’s is best described as positivistic Existentialism, and Santayana’s as phenomenological intuitionism. Santayana’s post-Hegelian approach to doing philosophy allows for him to incorporate James’s major insights into his own thinking. The problem of how psychology relates to philosophy led Santayana to posit literary psychology as an alternative to its scientific variety, which once disentangled from James’s psychologism, represents the greatest virtue of James’s thinking.

Santayana at 150: International Interpretations is a collection of essays by seventeen authors celebrating the life and thought of Spanish–American philosopher George Santayana. This book appears on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Santayana’s birth. Appropriately, the authors come from both sides of the Atlantic and put forth a range of insights that demonstrate the continuing life and relevance of Santayana’s thinking. The book includes considerations of the major themes of his philosophy—materialism, naturalistic ethics, and aesthetics—and of the influence exerted on Santayana’s work by his life circumstances and geographic surroundings, especially of Rome.

In this broad-ranging book, the preeminent authority on the history of slavery meditates on the orgins, experience, and legacy of this "peculiar institution." David Brion Davis begins with a substantial and highly personal introduction in which he discusses some of the major ideas and individuals that have shaped his approach to history. He then presents a series of interlocking essays that cover topics including slave resistance, the historical construction of race, and the connections between the abolitionist movement and the struggle for women's rights. The book also includes essays on such major figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as appreciations of two of the finest historians of the twentieth century: C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese. Gathered together for the first time, these essays present the major intellectual, historical, and moral issues essential to the study of New World slavery and its devastating legacy. Book jacket.

In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative scholars in America and at several of the country's great universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more immediate result was the publication in 1928 of On the Form of the American Mind, the young philosopher's first major work, in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and form. Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in European and American philosophy and continues with an extended interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political scientist John R. Commons (Voegelin was particularly interested in Commons' views on the mental, political, social, and economic aspects of democracy in modern urban and industrial America). Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of a theoretical nature. Analysis of On the Form of the American Mind indicates that Voegelin integrated the approaches of Lebensphilosophie into what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends within the discourse of the Geisteswissenschaften and finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical anthropology. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers On the Form of the American Mind in the context of methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American experience and compares his work with similar studies written during the post-World War I period.

The epic wisdom contained in a lost library helps the author turn his life around John Kaag is a dispirited young philosopher at sea in his marriage and his career when he stumbles upon West Wind, a ruin of an estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that belonged to the eminent Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, with whom Kaag feels a deep kinship. It is James’s question “Is life worth living?” that guides this remarkable book. The books Kaag discovers in the Hocking library are crawling with insects and full of mold. But he resolves to restore them, as he immediately recognizes their importance. Not only does the library at West Wind contain handwritten notes from Whitman and inscriptions from Frost, but there are startlingly rare first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As Kaag begins to catalog and read through these priceless volumes, he embarks on a thrilling journey that leads him to the life-affirming tenets of American philosophy—self-reliance, pragmatism, and transcendence—and to a brilliant young Kantian who joins him in the restoration of the Hocking books. Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is ultimately about love, freedom, and the role that wisdom can play in turning one’s life around.

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the mystery inherent in positioned codes and signs.