Santayana took to teaching as a swan to ping-pong. He disliked the idea of being thought "essentially" a professor. As for teaching philosophy, he found the enterprise quite hopeless: "I can't take the teaching of philosophy seriously in itself, either as a means of being a philosopher or of teaching the young anything solid." As a teacher, his interest, he tells us in his autobiography, "was never in facts or erudition, but always in persons and ideas." He seems never to have viewed teaching philosophy mare than a "decent means of livelihood," to which he was never fully committed. Not difficult to sympathize. College philosophy is dry bones; it teaches that this is nominalism, that materialism, the other naturalism; that Plato thought this, that Aristotle thought that, and that Descartes came along and thought very differently. Not much to do with genuine thinking here.
-Joseph Epstein, from his essay on George Santayana in Essays in Biography
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