George Santayana

(Spanish-American philosopher, 1863–1952). A celebrated figure, Santayana's first major philosophical work, The Sense of Beauty (1896), puts the view that beauty is objectified pleasure, and is considered perhaps the first book of aesthetics written in the United States. His most famous quote comes from Reason in Common Sense (1905), the first volume of his The Life of Reason: "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." Santayana's major late works are Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and the mature articulation of his ontology, The Realms of Being (4 Vols., 1927–40), which presents an unusual and sophisticated synthesis of materialism and Platonism.