Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 05 Fall 1987

              The Santayana Edition
This has been a significant year for The Works of George Santayana. The
first volume, Persons and Places, was published in late fall 1986, and from
the outset, the volume has won critical acclaim in reviews appearing in
The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Village
Voice, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer,
Dallas Times Herald, and other publications. Rarely do the works of
philosophers receive such notice, but it is clearly overdue for George
Santayana, Fortunately, the official announcement of the volume
coincided with the publication of John McCormick's, George Santayana: A
Biography (New York: Knopf, 1987), the first complete biography of
Santayana.
The appearance of John M. Robson's article in this issue of Overheard
in Seville represents the finest of critical evaluations and also indicates two
areas that I find disappointing in many of the reviews. First, most of the
reviewers provide little indication of the autobiography's importance for
understanding Santayana's philosophy. The philosophical import of the
volume may be a particular bias on my part, but it does seem that the
substantive inclusion of material on the development of Santayana's
thought as well as the inclusion of all the previously omitted passages on
Spinoza, for example, deserve notice, and more than passing notice.
Secondly, the function of a scholarly, critical edition is often
misunderstood, although Daniel Aaron and John Robson clearly have an
understanding of these issues far beyond the normal fare. Critical
editions are attempts to publish works that are as close to what the
author wanted as is possible. The apparatus of a critical edition provides
evidence for editorial decisions made in the establishment of the text, i.e.,
evidence for the critical judgments made by the editors when several
variant readings of the same text occurs in authoritative sources
(manuscripts, first editions, later editions, annotations, etc.). Some
reviewers complain of the length of the editorial apparatus in volume
one, but, in fact, it is considerably shorter than for most critical editions
of its nature. (Robson's page counting unfortunately includes the 79 page
index which I assume he would not wish to shorten.) The Council for
Scholarly Editions, the Modern Language Association agency that
provides the seal aAn Approved Edition," allowed the apparatus to be
significantly shorter than normal by adjusting their requirements, for
example, by permitting us not to include the Alterations List (344
typescript pages). For those who are interested in Santayana's alterations
to his manuscript (often important in understanding why Santayana
finally settled on using a particular word), the list is now housed in the
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
There is no question that most scholars are more interested in the
substantive than in the textual issues of the volume, but what seems to be
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