Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 25 Fall 2007

              PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE 29
Materialism. This line, however, is scarcely continued in Chapter III, on social issues,
although one could talk about Santayana's, say, "Conservative Liberalism" or
"Undemocratic Liberty" instead of Moreno's On Liberalism and Democracy, although
it must be admitted that the author recognizes the tension between aristocratism and
democratism in Santayana. Let me add at this place that Moreno hardly explores
another binary opposition; although, as I said above, he is not willing to promote
Santayana Spanishness by any means, it does not mean that Santayana's Spanishness
should be nearly ignored at the places where Santayana is a wonderful case to
investigate the philosophical and cultural relations between America and Spain; this is
the reason why, I would very willingly read something more about Moreno's view of
Santayana in the context of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (much more than we
already know from PP) as well as Santayana's (evolving?) relation to America in
general — nowadays, in the era of Americanization in Spain, in Europe, and elsewhere
this might have a double meaning.
The whole material is presented from the perspective of philosophy as a way of
life, as the subtitle of the book indicates. To put it differently, the theoretical
problematic in philosophy is assisted by the practical implementation of philosophy
understood in a more or less similar way as in the Stoics, Michel de Montaigne, and
Henry David Thoreau, although Moreno himself does not extrapolate these very
names. In my personal opinion, Moreno strongly believes, as Santayana did, that
philosophy is something more than a form of sophisticated reflection and that it is
deprived of something very significant if left just to reason; therefore, he wants to reread and re-examine Santayana in the fashion of the importance of philosophy to live a
fuller life, which makes it possible for the whole work to assume a more general
meaning and produce a more universal message.
Five chapters of this rich, interesting, and well written book are preceded by an
Introduction and followed by a Bibliographical Appendix that offers important,
although general and introductory, pieces of information for those who would like to
have a sense of all Santayana's major works, including his own works, the editions,
Spanish translations, the works about Santayana in English and Spanish as well as
something about the present state of professional studies over Santayana and, last but
not least, about the activity of both the George Santayana Society and Overheard in
Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society.
KRZYSZTOF (CHRIS) PIOTR SKOWRONSKI
Opole University, Poland
Carta desde Espana
Beyond Daniel Moreno's book reviewed above, there has been considerable
research and activity in Spain concerning George Santayana; a look at the
bibliographic update below will demonstrate this. The latest number, 27, of
the journal LIMBO ran a "Simposio sobre Thinking in the Ruins," a series of papers
devoted to the book of Michael Hodges and John Lachs, whose full title is Thinking in
the Ruins .'Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency, published in 2000 by
Vanderbilt University Press. The website associated with the journal,
<www.hiperlimbo.com>
may in the future include a translation into English; it is actively maintained.