Talk:José Ortega y Gasset

Translation
I've translated this from the Spanish-language Wikipedia. It could use some fleshing out (including about Ortega y Gasset's politics) and the "Philosophy" section at the bottom is very weak, but it's all there was in the original. -- Jmabel 19:38, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

cut from article: influential on Heidegger
I've brought the following recently added sentence over here for discussion.


 * Ortega y Gassett was extremely influential on existentialism, especially the work of Martin Heidegger as Ortega y Gasset was at pains to point out.

Since this pretty much accuses him of boasting about influencing Heidegger, I don't think this should be added without a citation of him making such a claim. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:26, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

If you read The Dehumanisation of Art (don't have page number to hand) Ortega y Gassett includes a long footnote in which he praises Heidegger (in a back handed sort of way) before pointing out that almost all of his best ideas were taken directly from 'Meditations on Quixote'. I will get the quote in a few weeks. Ortega y Gassett was not a modest man, and was very sensitive to being slighted, especially if this was because he was Spanish (he felt). BScotland


 * Makes sense, and with a citation I'd be glad to have it in there, but definitely not the sort of thing to add without citation. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:23, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

>> The Dehumanisation of Art Princeton University Press 1972 page 146.

'Heideggers admirable book Being and Time...arrives at a definition of life not far from this (i.e. the one Ortega is arguing for).....but i am obliged to say i owe Heidegger very little....of Heidegger's important concepts but one or two at most have not been previously expressed in one of my books....'....Ortega then goes on for two more pages (in a footnote!!!) to show the extent to which Heidegger 'stole' (my word not his) his (i.e. Ortega's) ideas.

So i have put the sentence back in.


 * Please see WP:INDEPENDENT. --Omnipaedista (talk) 02:04, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Cut: true but trivial
"In spanish speaking countries there is a common joke relative to Ortega y Gasset. A literal translation of his name to english (if that was possible) would be Ortega and Gasset. The joke aquires many shapes but it basically verses on the fact that uneducated people think Ortega y Gasset are two spanish philosohpers (Ortega and Gasset)."

True enough, but not really important enough for an encyclopedia article. By the way, I'm pretty sure this joke shows up in Gabriel Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres (somewhere in one of Bustrófedon's lists). A similar joke in English is on the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pronounced (in the joke) as Sir Arthur Cohen and Doyle. I believe that one comes from Allan Sherman. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:53, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Reference needed: uncited quote
This sentence, found toward the end of the of the section on Circunstancia 2.1, contains an important quote from Ortega that I feel merits an explicit reference. The sentence reads and sounds like Ortega and I feel that I have come across it before but for life of me I don't know where to start looking for it again.

The connextion that Ortega makes with fate and circumstances is often intentionally problematic and more dynamically dramatic then currently comes across. At the time I don't have any suggested changes other than citing the reference source.


 * "In this sense Ortega wrote that life is at the same time fate and freedom, and that freedom “is being free inside of a given fate. Fate gives us an inexorable repertory of determinate possibilities, that is, it gives us different destinies. We accept fate and within it we choose one destiny.”"

Tino 02:19, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Heavily influenced: John Lukacs
I added the significant historian and historical thinker John Lukacs to the list of those influenced by Ortega y Gasset. In Lukacs' most important work (at least by his own reckoning), Historical Consciousness, he quotes and references Ortega y Gasset often and with great approbation. On page 296 of that work, Lukacs scolds those who saw Ortega "as not much more than an unusually intelligent reactionary gadfly;" Lukacs, by contrast, considered him one of the 20th-century's most significant thinkers. Ortega also pops up in many of Lukacs' other works, but he is the most consistent individual references in Historical Consciousness. Julián Marías aside, Lukacs is probably the most significant individual strongly influenced by Ortega. Biasedbulldog (talk) 20:47, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm saddened to learn of this connection... I came over to this page to congratulate all involved in this excellent article, and to remark that I'd had no idea what an interesting fellow this guy was (although I read the Revolt of the Masses many years ago and remember liking it a lot more than I expected to). The part of the article about the picture of truth that emerges from taking in all perspectives is great — I've been groping towards that notion for ages, but hadn't nailed it, and didn't realize anyone else had. But LUKACS??!! Oy vey! Around 1983 or so, I was hired to illustrate the jacket for a new edition of Historical Consciousness and had to try to read enough to know what I was dealing with. It was easily the most ridiculous book I've ever tried to read — layer after layer of meaningful-sounding hogwash, adding up to less than nothing, This wasn't due to an allergy to heavy thoughts or turgid prose per se — I got a charge out of every paragraph of the the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology, which was a breeze to read to compared to Lukacs, because it rewarded the effort — three or four re-readings would always reveal what Hegel was up to (flashing bulb over reader's head). But with Lukacs, the tenth reading was as barren of real meaning as the first. I hate to think Ortega y Gasset was in any way responsible for that disaster. I was really looking forward to delving into OyG's other work after seeing this article — now I'm inclined not to bother... I strongly disagree with your last sentence by the way — my father was a big fan of OyG and considered OyG a strong influence on his (deeply reactionary and sort of anti-intellectual, but still often reasonable) ideas; I can assure you my father was a more "significant individual" than Lukacs although he didn't publish anything besides a brief history of the local golf course, and a lot of letters to editors attacking socialists and the religious right with equal vehemence.Chelydra (talk) 05:12, 30 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I have to say you are incredibly mistaken, and that Ortega should be proud that he helped influence Lukacs. Historical Consciousness is a slightly inscrutable book at first, and it is certainly his most difficult work to understand.  I've read the intro to Phenomenology, and I found it to be twice as impenetrable as HC though.  Lukacs is a fantastic writer and an absolutely brilliant mind, one of the best thinkers of the 20th century.  I'm writing my undergraduate thesis on his work, and I have to say that I enjoy his writing as much now as I ever did. His narrative histories are very readable -- The Duel, Five Days in London, his book on the Blood, Sweat, Toil, Tears speech.  It is reassuring to know the origins of the '84 edition's cover, which I have always found to be, well, inscrutable and meaningless.  I should add that we made fun of it in class. Biasedbulldog (talk) 01:32, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Ortega and solitude.
Despite having studied Ortega for over forty years, first under the tutelage of the remarkable and remarkably little-known Mickey Gibson, I don't feel comfortable making or suggesting any direct edits. The article is good enough as it goes and seems to cover all the bases. It would probably require re-casting in its entirety to make any substantive changes.

The area in which it seems a little light is the elision of Ortega's evocation of the concept of solitude, which is an existential condition rather than a psychological state, a fact of life rather than an opportunity to grieve. While maintaining the recognition that 'aloneness' is the default status of the human mind, this leads Ortega away from the fatalism and the consequent fascination with dread, anguish, and death that characterizes so much existential thought and speaks to his inherent optimism about the human capacity to change things.

There's a great deal more about Ortega that could be said, the deconstruction and re-integration of Descartes that is at the bottom of his revolutionary reconciliation of idealism and realism chief among them, but this is not the place for it.

Uniquerman (talk) 20:01, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Choice of word
"as Hegel proposed, overcome both the lack of idealism (in which reality gravitated around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism (which is for him an undeveloped point of view in which the subject is located outside the world) in order to focus in the only truthful reality (i.e. life).

I was a bit confused when I read this part of the article. Maybe it would be better to write "overcome the deficiencies of idealism".

Thanks.

You are welcome. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.210.237.123 (talk) 06:11, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Merquior (talk) 23:17, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

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Death reasons?
Are there any death reasons? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clrichey (talk • contribs) 21:17, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia

 * This sub-section is not in English. The translation appears to be "I am me and my circumstance" but this needs to be checked and translated. --  Otr500 (talk) 04:16, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Ratiovitalism

 * At first, I thought this might be a misspelling or a mistranslation. It turns out this is one of two words (according to the article and along with "vital reason") the subject coined.
 * This means the words are considered neologisms. In psychology Mr. Webster states "a new word that is coined especially by a person affected with schizophrenia and is meaningless except to the coiner, and is typically a combination of two existing words or a shortening or distortion of an existing word".
 * At any rate, Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advancing neologisms so the sub-section needs renaming. -- Otr500 (talk) 05:10, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Article issues

 * There are other issues besides those listed above. The article is tagged with "This article needs additional citations for verification", a blanket tag for the whole article, but there is the "Works" section that needs attention and too many red links in the "Bibliography" section.


 * A paragraph and 38 entries in the "Works" section are unsourced. The entire "Bibliography" section is unsourced.
 * While there are (and have been) a following that sourcing on an article is not needed as long as any content is verifiable: All material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists, and captions, must be verifiable. All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material, which is sort of like silence and consensus, that the criterion changes when challenged. There are typically two exceptions, 1)- a limited exception for unsourced and uncontested summary material in the lead that is sourced in the body of the article, and 2)- the "External links" section.
 * Wikipedia verification policy is not unclear and unsourced and challenged material can be removed. When unsourced content has been contested the criterion for re-inclusion is covered under WP:BURDEN.
 * Solutions include, providing citations, deleting unsourced contested material, and moving the unsourced and contested material to the talk page for future inclusion with citations.