Detailed presentation of American philosopher's pragmatic concept of epistemology, isolation of realms of existents and subsistents. Chapters include "There is No First Principle of Criticism," Dogma and Doubt," and "The Discovery of Essence."
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79 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Santayana's philosophical masterpiece,
By
This review is from: Scepticism and Animal Faith (Paperback)
This book is the most distinguished work of philosophy to emerge out of the critical realist tradition. Santayana defends the duality between ideas in the mind and the things these ideas represent in the natural world. Using this epistemological dualism, Santayana explains why all forms of idealism are unwarranted and absurd. Since human knowledge is merely symbolic (rather than literal), all the skeptical arguments claiming that, unless we can prove that our ideas are in some sense "identical" to the things they represent, then it follows that things the ideas allegedly represent must be consider as "unknowable." But Santayana shrewdly reminds us that knowledge consists in "thinking aptly about things, not in becoming like them." External reality, before it can be grasped by the mind, must be reduced to the human level."Skepticism and Animal Faith," along with David Stove's "The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies," represents the most effective and withering criticism that has ever been directed against the idealist creed. Where Stove attacks the positive argument for idealism, Santayana focuses his polemical guns on the negative argument--i.e., on the idealist argument against realism. Santayana shows how idealist skepticism of the existence of an external reality, if followed consistently, would deprive all our ideas of their cognitive meaning. If idealism is taken to its logical extreme, we would all find ourselves trapped in a solipsism of the passing moment, unable to understand the significance of any idea, image, or feeling experienced by the mind. The reason why human beings generally do not lapse into this state of idealist stupidity is because biological urges prompt them to assume that their ideas refer to things existing in an external, natural world. This biological urge Santayana calls "animal faith." It is a faith that is rewarded and justified in every moment of our waking existence; and even those who deny it speculatively assume its validity in action and intent. I personally regard "Skepticism and Animal Faith" as the greatest work of epistemology ever written. This is a judgment, however, that few would agree with. Many philosophers disparage Santayana because he eschews most of the technical problems of epistemology and also because he writes more like a poet than an academic scholar. There is no symbolic logic, no arid syllogisms, no dryasdust argumentation in any of Santayana's philosophic works. Philosophy, for Santayana, is not a technique or a science, but an art. The technical epistemologies of academic philosophers are, accordingly, hopeless endeavors. "Thought can only be found by being enacted," Santayana writes. "I may therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility make experience or mental discourse at large the object of investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere." In the final analysis, what makes Santayana superior to most other philosophers is his superior good sense coupled with the rare ability to express this wisdom in memorable phrases and apt metaphors. If there is a more beautifully written book of epistemology, I have yet to see it.
4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
yes but,
By William Warren "Futures Unlimited" (Pontiac,Illinois,statti unitti) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Scepticism and Animal Faith (Paperback)
Is animal faith really that different from Hume's turn to backgammon as
a response to skepticism?
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