Shattered Pictures of Places and Cities se adentra por las páginas autobiográficas, filosóficas y narrativas más relevantes de George Santayana discurriendo por sus viajes y geografías físicas en paralelo a sus viajes y geografías morales. Es un intento de ir más allá de la reflexión entorno a los orígenes biográficos del filósofo; de ahí que se recupere una indagación sobre su habitar el lenguaje y el arte. Santayana reconsidera los fundamentos del arte de la memoria clásica en su autobiografía, para formular una nueva propuesta estética donde el arte y la vida se funden y se confunden, estimulándose recíprocamente. Hila una filosofía del viaje y del lugar, donde se privilegia una noción del habitar que ilumina nuestra condición de nómadas -en la vida y en el pensamiento-, y nuestra trágica estable inestabilidad en este mundo.

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.

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.

This book combines concepts from the history of religions with Byzantine studies in its assessments of kings, symbols, and cities in a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis. The work attests, firstly, that the symbolic art and architecture of ancient cities—commissioned by their monarchs expressing their relationship with their gods—show us that religiosity was inherent to such enterprises. It also demonstrates that what transpired from the first cities in history to Byzantine Christendom is the gradual replacement of the pagan ruler cult—which was inherent to city-building in antiquity—with the ruler becoming subordinate to Christ; exemplified by representations of the latter as the ‘Master of All’ (Pantokrator). Beginning in Mesopotamia, the book continues with an analysis of city-building by rulers in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, before addressing Judaism (specifically, the city of Jerusalem) and Christianity as shifting the emphasis away from pagan-gods and rulers to monotheistic perceptions of God as elevated above worldly kings. It concludes with an assessment of Christian Rome and Constantinople as typifying the evolution from the ancient and classical world to Christendom.

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.

Acclaimed by many as one of the most gifted essayists and stylists in American letters these last few decades, Richard Rodriguez has left an indelible imprint on the tradition of autobiographical writing of the nation. Rodeño’s study of the four installments of Rodriguez’s self-writing offers an insightful and perspicacious analysis of the evolution and the most controversial elements in this Chicano writer’s production so far. Delving deeply into issues of racial and ethnic identity, sexual orientation, religious background, various types of hybridity, and different forms of socio-cultural adaptation, this book presents all kinds of incisive observations about the contested space(s) that “minority” self-writers are often pushed to occupy in the American tradition of the genre.

Durante los años sesenta y setenta aparece cierto interés en el fenómeno de las personas blancas que se comportan como indios o nativos, así como un nuevo entusiasmo por desafiar la tradición Cooperiana de cruzar las líneas del color en narraciones aparentemente no racistas. Este libro analiza cómo el «patio de recreo intelectual» proporciona biografías postcoloniales de «personajes tan escurridizos» como Sir William Johnson, Mary Jemison, May Dodd, y Archie Belaney/Grey Owl, o de otros ficticios como Jack Crabb y Jeremy Sadness. Los textos analizados aquí plantean cuestiones relacionadas con la construcción de la identidad, el parentesco ficticio y el etnicidad simbólica, las motivaciones y los impulsos que subyacen al comportamiento/juego de ser «otro», así como los procesos e implicaciones de la transculturación y de la epistemología de las relaciones de raza.