Abstract
Santayana was that rarest of beasts, a philosopher who was also a cultivated man of letters, with a superlative gift for producing vivid and evocative writing across the full range of forms-philosophical treatises, essays, sketches, dialogues, literary criticism, poetry, the best-selling novel The Last Puritan (1935), and the three-volume autobiography Persons and Places (1944-53). To his credit, Singer, a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of valuable studies of the philosophy of love, has little patience for such narrow perspectives. Santayana, "more than any other great philosopher in the English language," sought to "harmonize" literary and philosophical styles of writing, making the centrality of the humanistic imagination "a fundamental resource in his doctrinal outlook."