An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on American philosophy, poet, critic, and best-selling novelist George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana Scholarship.

An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana Scholarship.

An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on American philosophy, poet, critic, and best-selling novelist George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana Scholarship.

An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on American philosopher, poet, critic, and best-selling novelist George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana scholarship.

An annual publication, Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society includes scholarly articles on American philosopher, poet, critic, and best-selling novelist George Santayana as well as announcements of publications and meetings pertaining to Santayana scholarship.

Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive analysis of his complete œuvre, however, reveals something else entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a conservative without political commitment, but, if one respects his own language, one discerns an astonishing, little-known Santayana, whose philosophical leitmotif consists in: 1) detecting the numerous “false steps,” logical and moral, supplied by the imagination when it confuses things with the names that designate them, or the world with the feelings that it provokes in the human animal—these errors assume diverse faces: pantheism, moralism, egotism, subjectivism, transcendentalism, Platonism, Puritanism, and utopianism; 2) avoiding these illusions in such a way as to keep the spiritual door open as a form of life to be lived out in an honest fashion; 3) recognizing the natural origin of these temptations and asking oneself what moves humans to succumb imperceptibly to these mistakes, at times tragic, at others comical, and what precautions one can take to remain cognizant of the deceitful leaps that can hijack one’s life; and 4) proposing as an alternative the radical distinction between essence and existence, which leads him to distinguish four realms of being: the realm of essence, the realm of matter, the realm of truth, and the realm of spirit. Essence as logical identity, matter as contingent existence, truth as frozen history, and spirit as the flames that part from contingency and approximate the eternal. An attempt has been made in this book to expand on and clarify these questions.

Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind provides an original framework for a non-reductive approach to mind and philosophical psychology. Jessica Wahman challenges the reductive (i.e., mechanistic and physicalist) assumptions that render the mind-body problem intractable, and claims that George Santayana’s naturalism provides a more beneficial epistemological method and ontological framework for thinking about the place of consciousness in the natural world. She uses Santayana’s thought as the primary inspiration for her own specific viewpoint, one that draws on a variety of sources, from analytic philosophy of mind to existentialism and psychoanalysis. This outlook, narrative naturalism, depicts sense-making as a kind of storytelling where different narratives serve different purposes, and Wahman offer a unique worldview to accommodate a variety of true expressions about the world, including truths about subjective existence. Motivated by a desire to challenge the reductionist approaches that explain human motivation and experience in terms of neuroscience and by the increasingly pharmacological interpretations of and solutions to psychological problems, Wahman’s overarching purpose is to reconstruct the issue so that neuroscience can be embraced as an indispensable story among others in our understanding of the human condition. When placed in this context, neurobiological discoveries better serve the values and practices associated with human self-knowledge and well-being. Narrative Naturalism will appeal to those interested in American philosophy, Santayana scholarship, pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and metaphysics.