Abstract

This essay has two parts. In the first one I try to show the crucial importance of Husserl’s phenomenology (Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen I) in Ortega’s thought at least till 1929. In this period it is not an exaggeration to say that Ortega understands his philosophy as a peculiar development of Husserl’s theory of intentionality. After this date, and influenced by the publication Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, he begins to consider Husserlian thought as the last and more refined form of idealism. The antidote against it should be a philosophy of vital or historical reason, a form of non-idealistic phenomenology, which is close to the existential one.