ABSTRACT
Jose Ortega y Gasset is one of the most important and attractive Spanish thinkers. An exiled Spanish philosopher said of him that he was 'the pre-Socratic of our tongue, the source to which one must return as or more often than to the Greek pre-Socratics'. One might say that Ortega had sought in Kant an analytical scheme by which to objectify the characteristics of the Spanish problem and take restorative action. Ortega also clearly coincided with Heidegger regarding the individual and personal freedom, to such an extent that at times he made an emphatic point of just how he had given expression to certain ideas before the German philosopher had done so. Part of Ortega's circumstances was the Europe in which World War I broke out and pulverized modernity. Indeed, as Graham has pointed out, Ortega was one of the first thinkers to conceive how the modern era was coming to an end to be replaced by the postmodern era.
