Contributors
Participants on this blog & in Zoom discussions of this project
Jack Baker.
Philip Beard.
Doug Blaylock. My interest in Santayana came from a first reading of Scepticism and Animal Faith in my early twenties. For me, this great work has had a lasting impact. With a background in economics and business from James Madison University, I am one of the few non-academic participants in the group.
Evelyn Burg: I have a BA in Philosophy from Queens College, CUNY, an MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota, and a PhD in History (specialty European and American Intellectual, dissertation on Kenneth Burke) from The Graduate Center at CUNY. I have taught Philosophy, History, English, and Reading and presently teach full time in English at LaGuardia, CUNY, where I am full professor. I have published on Kenneth Burke primarily but also some smaller pieces on Locke, feminism, and photography, as well as on educational topics. I have been reading and thinking about Santayana since I included him in a course in American Philosophy I taught in 2015 at Queens.
David Dilworth. Professor of Philosophy at Stonybrook University, New York. PhDs in Philososphy (Fordham, 1963) and in East Asian Languages and Cultures (Columbia, 1970). Generalist in history of philosophy, East and West, with specializations in American and Japanese intellectual history. Interest in Wallace Stevens grows out of background in R. W. Emerson, C. S. Peirce, W. Whitman, and E. Dickinson.
Matthew Flamm. Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University. My scholarly concentration has been on Santayana and other “Classical American philosophers,” though as I’ve evolved in my fifteen years of a 4/4 teaching load with general population (mostly B.S. degree-seeking) students, I have branched out — and most recently completed an interdisciplinary co-authored book, The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy (Routledge Focus, 2020).
Jerry Griswold. Though he has taught elsewhere, Griswold retired as a professor of literature from San Diego State University. A specialist in American Literature and in Children’s Literature, he has published seven books and dozens of essays in the popular press. He first began his studies of Stevens and Santayana as an undergraduate in Seattle, continued this pursuit while a graduate student at Fordham and the U. of Connecticut, and now (decades later) has reactivated that interest during the coronavirus quarantine. He moderates this blog.
Jack Hart. I am a tutor and researcher at Brasenose College, Oxford. My doctoral thesis suggests that how poems come about is intimately tied up with what they’re about, and it examines how writers of the Romantic and Victorian periods revised their work. I also have interests in modernist poetry, and have a forthcoming essay in Modernism/modernity on Wallace Stevens’ relationship with Plato.
Paul Newton. I am an attorney with experience in law and litigation, medical and research ethics and compliance, bioethics, institutional review board oversight and animal research care and protection. Prior to being involved in research ethics work, I spent fifteen years as a criminal defense lawyer. My interest in George Santayana is non-academic but related to his marvelous insights regarding animal faith and animal cognition. And I’ve been reading Wallace Stevens so long I don’t remember what it was that began my love of his work.
George Ohlson. I am one of the non-academic participants in this group. Though I received my undergraduate degree in History, I have spent my career as an orchestral violist and teacher of violin and viola. I have been reading and reflecting on the work of Wallace Stevens for many years as part of my general interest in American Literary Modernism.
Ramon Rodríguez-Aguilera. (Born, 1950). Professor of Philosophy, Universidad de Sevilla (retired, 2020). I have been teaching in two extensive general issues, successive in time. First: Theory and Philosophy of History (i.e., The Nature of History/The historical condition of human nature). Second: Classical American Pragmatism within the History of Western Philosophy (that is, between phenomenology and analytical philosophy). In the last years, I also looked into Lao ze and Eihei Dogen (as a proposed introduction to the Chinese and Japanese Philosophy), assuming in this way Taoism-Buddhism in relation to Spinoza as a basic approach in philosophy.
Richard M. Rubin. Fourth year as editor of Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society. President of the George Santayana Society, since 2017. Member of Executive Committee since 2015. Recent articles: “The Dewey-Santayana Rivalry” (Limbo 40, 2020); in Overheard in Seville: “Santayana in 1944” (2019), “Santayana in 1943” (2018), “Character and Philosophic Creativity–the Example of Santayana” (2018 “Santayana in 1942” (2017), “Santayana and the Arts” (2016), “Lachs vs. Santayana,” (in John Lachs Practical Philosophy, edited by Krzysztof Skowronski, Brill | Rodopi: 2018). Recent lectures: “How Reconstruction Works (John Dewey Conference 2019 , Fudan University, Shanghai), “Abstract Photography and the Work of Rebecca Barnard,” lecture in conjunction with an exhibit of her work, Webster University, St Louis (2018), “Becoming Human Requires Freedom of Expression” World Congress of Philosophy, Beijing (2018), “Santayana’s Missing Letter to Dewey,” Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (2015), Fifteen presentations of “I am Life, the story of Rebecca Barnard’s dementia (since 2013).
Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. Retired. Founding Editor of The Works of George Santayana, MIT Press, 1977–2003. Founding Chair of Santayana Society and Founding Editor of Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society. Edited 48 books and authored 54 articles. President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (2000–1), President of Association for Documentary Editing (1996–7), Chair of AASCU Policies and Purposes Committee (2013–4), Chair of Southern New Jersey Chamber of Commerce (2008–10). Held endowed an chair in philosophy, two deanships, and president of a state university, and held professorships in medical ethics, medical genetics, pediatrics, and philanthropy. A Life of Scholarship with Santayana containing fifty years of my articles and essays will be published in 2021 by Brill, edited by Charles Padron and Krzysztof Skowronski.
Eric Craig Sapp is a lawyer, researcher in the history of ideas, and verse scribbler. He uses philosophy to scan the law, jurisprudence to think literature, and poetry to judge metaphysics — and vice versa.
Krzysztof (Chris) Piotr Skowroński, PhD. I teach Social Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Multiculturalism at the University of Opole, Poland, and I am scientific affairs manager at Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum e.V. I authored Santayana and America. Values, Liberties, Responsibility (Cambridge Scholars 2007), co-edited (with Matt Flamm) Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana (Cambridge Scholars) 2007 and (with Charles Padrón) A Life of Scholarship with Santayana: Essays and Reflections by Herman Saatkamp (to be published by Brill in 2021). I also wrote, edited and co-edited around 15 books on contemporary culture and philosophy, especially American pragmatism (Brill, Rodopi, Routledge, Fordham, Lexington Books, among others). I blog at chrisskowronski.com
Barbara Stross. I graduated from Reed College with a B.A. in Literature (thesis in Drama), and M.A. in Teaching. I’ve spent much of my working life as a teacher in the K-12 public system in Portland, Oregon and taught math at Portland Community College. I’m currently teaching on-line as a para-educator substitute, while waiting until I can travel again to visit my son and his wife, who live in Panama.
Faedra Weiss is assistant editor of the Santayana Edition and is currently working on the critical edition of Scepticism and Animal Faith. She recently retired from a long career with a positive youth development organization. Her eclectic background includes rabbinic ordination and the M.A. in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where she also was an intern in the American Jewish Archives and the sole employee of the university press; an A.B. in mathematics-physics from Brown University; and decades of experience in editing, all of which are being put to good use in this project.
Peter Matthews Wright. Associate Professor and Co-Chair of Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Colorado College. I am an historian and critic of religious literatures, specializing in Islamic studies. As an historian, I read religious literature for clues to its historical contexts and implied audiences. As a critic, I study the ways in which the use of literary devices such as allusion, citation, and echo suggest intertextual relations among religious literatures and the communities who hold them sacred. Where Muslim literatures are concerned, my work builds upon the pioneering studies of Egyptian modernists such as Taha Husayn, Amin al-Khuli, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.
An overview of this blog & a Table of Contents can be found by clicking here.
