Asme Applied Mechanics Division Book of Abstracts Presented at the 1998 Asme International M... Book

Thanks to LibriVox.org, I was able to listen to an audio recording of this book on the road between home and campus. Santayana had a rhetorical and stylistic strength in his essays. Although I can't compare Santayana's conclusions with the current state of philosophy, I can say that these essays are likely to be useful and accessible to anyone with an interest in the history of philosophical thought. For example, the first two essays address John Locke. One of my favorite quotations, I discovered, came from Santayana's footnotes in the Locke essays. I had found the quotation attributed to Santayana in another book, but the writer didn't include the source of the quotation. Here's that favorite quotation: "Only literature can describe experience, for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies, but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into pleasures and pains, and into many-colored ideas."