Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 32 Fall 2014

              David Dilworth on Santayana
To read or listen to David Dilworth riff1 on the great philosophers of the past is
something of a tremendously challenging tutorship. I would like to think that
I can provide a useful perspective, if for no other reason than that I was once
an undergraduate student of his — not just that, twenty years ago I was a very green
philosophy major who made a real pedagogical connection with him and discovered
my love of American philosophy through his inspiring lectures. It would not be
overstating things to say that I owe my life occupation to Professor Dilworth, and
this opportunity to discuss his scholarship on Santayana is a tremendous privilege.
So, apologies in advance for injecting some of these assessments with personal
associations, but they are included for honest reasons; from that early connection I
would like to think that I obtained a kind of leg-up appreciating his uniquely brilliant
angle of vision. On first acquaintance his perspective for some can be dizzying
and perhaps overwhelming. Dilworth speaks with substantive appreciation of a
staggering array of major figures, and traditions from across the spectrum of arts and
letters spanning Western and Eastern traditions. Meantime too, his reliance at times
on highly technical conceptual vocabulary — even sometimes in idle conversation
— is apt to confound. And yet, I believe that Dilworth is that very rare instance of
a scholar who can rise to a level of insight proportionate to the genius possessed by
the subjects under analysis. Moreover, and this is the feature of his perspective that
I hope comes through here, he is at heart a poet, a lover of the music of language in
a sense that is astonishing in a scholar so adept at the same time at thinking in terms
of the great philosophic systems.2
Now the task at hand is to convey something of Dilworth's contribution to our
understanding of Santayana. This is no straightforward task. When I first became
acquainted with Professor Dilworth, Santayana held a place of privilege in his
historical understanding that I discern has declined over the years. Or at any rate,
it might be fairer to say that over the years Peirce has figured more centrally in
Dilworth's historical understanding, with Santayana coming increasingly to seem to
him more derivative than previously estimated.3 To make the task manageable here I
shall focus primarily on the analysis of Santayana that Dilworth provides in his 1989
book Philosophy in World Perspective (Yale University Press). In this remarkable
book Dilworth makes use of a comparative hermeneutic that is of great interest,
or ought to be so, to anyone hoping to situate Santayana in "world perspective."
Once this task is accomplished I shall conclude with some observations about the
perspective of Santayana that seems to have developed in Dilworth's more recent
philosophic reflections, and in the meantime too I shall consider his trenchant
critique of contemporary academic scholarship.
1 "Riff" for some reason is an apt characterization.
2 Wallace Stevens and William James receive equal bill of appreciative consideration in
Dilworth's scholarly assessments as Kant, Aristotle, and Peirce.
3 I shall reserve room for this point in my concluding remarks. For Dilworth's most recent
statements on Santayana, see his "Mediterranean Aestheticism, Epicurean Materialism" in
Santayana at 150: International Interpretations (Lexington Books, 2014), 53-87.