Author Description

Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), Spain's leading philosopher, was also a serious thinker on many of the more complex issues in the study of history. Theory of History in Ortega y Gasset, the second in a three-volume set devoted to Ortega, is the first critical and comprehensive study of this very important side of his intricate body of thought. Following upon Graham's first volume, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset, this one examines Ortega's "instrumentalist" approach to history, which also reflects pragmatist thought (of William James and John Dewey), in a realist use of general models to formulate a kind of theoretical, "schematic history" culminating in an unfinished twenty-year project: "The Dawn of Historical Reason.". Theory of History in Ortega y Gasset is a full and coherent exposition of Ortega's systematic theory of history that will be of great interest to students and scholars in intellectual history and philosophy of history.