For other people named José Ortega, see José Ortega (disambiguation).
This name uses Spanish naming customs: the first or paternal family name is Ortega and the second or maternal family name is Gasset.
José Ortega y Gasset (Spanish: [xoˈse orˈteɣa i ɣaˈset]; 9 May 1883 – 18 October 1955) was a Spanish liberal philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism, and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" that "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism (prior to Martin Heidegger's) and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce."
On his return to Spain in 1908, he was appointed professor of Psychology, Logic and Ethics at the Escuela Superior del Magisterio de Madrid and in October 1910 he was named full professor of Metaphysics at Complutense University of Madrid, a vacant seat previously held by of Nicolás Salmerón.
Elected deputy for the Province of León in the constituent assembly of the Second Spanish Republic, he was the leader of a parliamentary group of intellectuals known as Agrupación al Servicio de la República ("The Grouping at the Service of the Republic"), but he soon abandoned politics, disappointed.
Leaving Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War, he spent years of exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina until moving back to Europe in 1942. He settled in Portugal by mid-1945 and slowly began to make short visits to Spain. In 1948 he returned to Madrid, where he founded the Institute of Humanities, at which he lectured.
For Ortega y Gasset, philosophy has a critical duty to lay siege to beliefs in order to promote new ideas and to explain reality. To accomplish such tasks, the philosopher must—as Husserl proposed—leave behind prejudices and previously existing beliefs, and investigate the essential reality of the universe. Ortega y Gasset proposes that philosophy must overcome the limitations of both idealism (in which reality centers around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism (in which reality is outside the subject) to focus on the only truthful reality: "my life"—the life of each individual. He suggests that there is no 'me' without things, and things are nothing without me: "I" (human being) cannot be detached from "my circumstance" (world). This led Ortega y Gasset to pronounce his famous maxim "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" ("I am I and my circumstance") (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914) which he always put at the core of his philosophy.
For Ortega y Gasset, vital reason is also "historical reason", for individuals and societies are not detached from their past. In order to understand a reality we must understand, as Dilthey pointed out, its history. In Ortega's words, humans have "no nature, but history" and reason should not focus on what is (static) but what becomes (dynamic).
Among those strongly influenced by Ortega y Gasset were Luis Buñuel, Manuel García Morente, Joaquín Xirau, Xavier Zubiri, Ignacio Ellacuría, Emilio Komar, José Gaos, Luis Recaséns Siches, Manuel Granell, Francisco Ayala, María Zambrano, Agustín Basave, Máximo Etchecopar, Pedro Laín Entralgo, José Luis López-Aranguren, Julián Marías, John Lukacs, Pierre Bourdieu, Paulino Garagorri, Olavo de Carvalho, Vilém Flusser and Félix Martí-Ibáñez.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Holmes, Oliver, "José Ortega y Gasset", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
↑ John T. Graham. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset. (University of Missouri Press, 1994), p. vii.
↑ Encarta Encyclopedia Spanish Version: Agrupación_al_Servicio_de_la_República Microsoft Corporation Spanish Version . Archived 2009-10-31.
↑ José Ortega y Gasset (1930/1950), The Revolt of the Masses, reprint, New York: New American Library, p. 4.
↑ as referenced by the Project Gutenberg eBook of U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1960 January – June.
Fitzsimons, David; Harper, Jim (2008). "Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955)". In Hamowy, Ronald. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 365–66. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.
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