The Perspectivist World of José Ortega y Gasset

Abstract

In this essay it is examined one of the most important notions in the Ortega y Gassets philosophy namely “perspectivism”. In the first place, it is reconstructed the first formulation of this doctrine as it was outlined in “Meditaciones del Quijote” from 1914, and then in “Espectador”  from 1916. This proyect of the “perspectivism was justified in the latter essays of Ortega in terms of the philosophical anthropology and a figure of the Spectator. In the second place it is argued that the perspectivism in Ortega has passed through a radical evolution: from its ontological version where perspective was seen as an individualistic relationship between I and the circunstance, to the later, epistemological and culturalist formulations of the more collectivist sort, which results a methodologically useful tool not only to the philosophical disciplines but also to the social sciences.