Spanish Philosophy

José Ortega y Gasset José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid on 9 May 1883 and died in the same city on 18 October 1955. He studied in Madrid and in Germany, above all at Marburg, where he came into contact with the Neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. In 1910 he took the chair of Metaphysics at the Universidad Central in Madrid. He was the leading figure of the so-called Generation of 1914, founded the Revista de Occidente (1923), and took part in Republican public life. With the outbreak of the Civil War he left Spain in 1936 and lived in exile (France, Argentina, Portugal) until his return in the second half of the 1940s; in 1948 he founded the Instituto de Humanidades in Madrid together with Julián Marías. ...

María Zambrano María Zambrano Alarcón was born in Vélez-Málaga on 22 April 1904 and died in Madrid on 6 February 1991. She studied philosophy at the Universidad Central in Madrid, where she was a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset, Xavier Zubiri and Manuel García Morente, and taught before the Civil War. Committed to the Republican cause, she left Spain in 1939 and lived almost half a century in exile, in places including Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Rome, France and Switzerland, returning to Madrid in 1984. She received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 1981 and the Cervantes Prize in 1988, the first woman to win it. ...

Miguel de Unamuno Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born in Bilbao on 29 September 1864 and died in Salamanca on 31 December 1936. Professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Salamanca, he served as its rector from 1900 to 1914 and again from 1931, under the Second Republic. A central figure of the Generation of 98, he wrote essays, poetry, drama and novels, and rejected a rigid separation between philosophy and literature. For his opposition to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera he was exiled to Fuerteventura in 1924 and later lived in Paris and Hendaye until 1930. ...

Xavier Zubiri Xavier Zubiri Apalategui was born in San Sebastián on 4 December 1898 and died in Madrid on 21 September 1983. Trained in philosophy and theology in Madrid, Leuven and Rome, he was ordained a priest and, in 1926, won by competitive examination the chair of History of Philosophy at the Universidad Central in Madrid, where he was a disciple of Ortega y Gasset and Manuel García Morente. In 1929–1930 he studied at Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger, and then in Berlin, where he also devoted himself to physics, philology and biology. He left the clerical state in the 1930s and married Carmen Castro, daughter of the historian Américo Castro. After the Civil War, much of his work was presented in private courses and lectures, and only in the last decades of his life did it take the form of books. ...