José Ortega y Gasset: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

José Ortega y Gasset

(born May 9, 1883, Madrid, Spain — died Oct. 18, 1955, Madrid) Spanish philosopher. He taught at the University of Madrid from 1911 and lived abroad from 1931 to 1946. Though influenced by Neo-Kantianism, he diverged from it in works such as Adam in Paradise (1910), Quixote's Meditations (1914), and Modern Theme (1923). He saw individual life as the fundamental reality; for absolute reason he substituted reason as a function of life; for absolute truth he substituted the perspective of each individual. Sharing his generation's preoccupation with Spain's problems, he founded the periodicals España (1915), El sol (1917), and Revista de Occidente (1923). Of his other works, the best known are Invertebrate Spain (1922) and The Revolt of the Masses (1929), which foreshadowed the Spanish Civil War. He greatly influenced Spain's 20th-century cultural and literary renaissance.

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