Abstract
Wahman argues that Santayana’s account of knowledge as a leap of faith is a unique, important, and underappreciated contribution to epistemology. She explains that Santayana’s account of animal faith does not so much express a limitation of knowledge as a characterization of what it actually achieves: a faithful and practical transition of the mind from thoughts to the natural things that undergird them.
“There is no avenue to the past or the future, there is no room or breath for progressive life, except through faith in the intellect and in the reality of things not seen.”
—SAF, 29
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Notes
- 1.
The book ends with an invitation to the reader to investigate the realms of being made available by establishing knowledge as animal faith (SAF, 309).
- 2.
At the end of the Meditations, Descartes refers to his initial doubts as “exaggerated” and, indeed, “laughable” (Descartes 1984, 61).
- 3.
As I explain below, the presence of the datum is certain only in a vacuous sense, as the SPM does not involve any claim that the given is, in fact, given.
- 4.
In “Corpulent or a Train of Ideas? Santayana’s Critique of Hume,” I argue that Santayana did not fully appreciate the similarities between Hume and himself (Wahman 2007). It is possible that William James’s more radical empiricism caused Santayana to misunderstand the modern thinker and to overstate Hume’s focus on the experiential as philosophical subject matter.
References
Descartes, Rene. 1984. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press.
Santayana, George. 1923. Scepticism and Animal Faith. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. [1955 reprint].
———. 1948. Dialogues in Limbo, with Three New Dialogues. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Wahman, Jessica. 2007. Corpulent Or a Train of Ideas? Santayana’s Critique of Hume. Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society 25 (25): 1–9.
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Wahman, J. (2024). Knowledge as a Leap of Faith. In: Coleman, M.A., Tiller, G. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to George Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. Palgrave Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46367-9_6
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