Spanish · 1883–1955
Ortega was born into a Madrid newspaper family, studied under the neo-Kantians at Marburg, and came home determined to give Spain a philosophy and a public. He founded the Revista de Occidente, which published Freud, Husserl and Spengler in Spanish before most of Europe read them, wrote a weekly column that was effectively national tutoring, and held the chair of metaphysics in Madrid. His formula — I am myself and my circumstance — put the concrete situated life at the centre of philosophy a decade before Heidegger's Being and Time. He was elected to the Republican parliament in 1931 and disillusioned by 1932, left Spain during the Civil War, and returned in 1945 to a regime that tolerated him without letting him teach. The Revolt of the Masses made him the most widely read Spanish thinker since Suárez.