Ortega y Gasset José (1883–1955), Spanish philosopher and essayist. Born in Madrid, he studied there and in Leipzig, Berlin, and Marburg. In 1910 he was named professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid and taught there until 1936, when he was forced to leave because of his political involvement in and support for the Spanish Republic. He returned to Spain in 1945.
Ortega was a prolific writer whose works fill nine thick volumes. Among his most influential books are Meditaciones del Quijote (‘Meditations on the Quixote,’ 1914), El tema de nuestro tiempo (‘The Modern Theme,’ 1923), La revolución de las masas (‘The Revolt of the Masses,’ 1932), La deshumanización del arte (‘The Dehumanization of Art,’ 1925), Historia como sistema (‘History as a System,’ 1941), and the posthumously published El hombre y la gente (‘Man and People,’ 1957) and La idea de principio en Leibniz (‘The Idea of Principle in Leibniz,’ 1958). His influence in Spain and Latin America was enormous, in part because of his brilliant style of writing and lecturing. He avoided jargon and rejected systematization; most of his works were first written as articles for newspapers and magazines. In 1923 he founded the Revista de Occidente, a cultural magazine that helped spread his ideas and introduced German thought into Spain and Latin America.
Ortega ventured into nearly every branch of philosophy, but the kernel of his views is his metaphysics of vital reason (rasón vital) and his perspectival epistemology. For Ortega, reality is identified with ‘my life’; something is real only insofar as it is rooted and appears in ‘my life.’ ‘My life’ is further unpacked as ‘myself’ and ‘my circumstances’ (‘yo soy yo y mi circumstancia’). The self is not an entity separate from what surrounds it; there is a dynamic interaction and interdependence of self and things. These and the self together constitute reality. Because every life is the result of an interaction between self and circumstances, every self has a unique perspective. Truth, then, is perspectival, depending on the unique point of view from which it is determined, and no perspective is false except one that claims exclusivity. This doctrine is known as Ortega’s perspectivism. J.J.E.G.