Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes on Knowledge
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), the principal Spanish philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, gave the Mediterranean philosophical tradition one of its most distinctive epistemological frameworks in works such as Meditations on Quixote (1914), The Modern Theme (1923), and the late What Is Philosophy? (1957). The doctrine of perspectivism — captured in the famous formula "I am I and my circumstances" — treats all knowledge as situated in the historically and biographically specific point of view from which it is articulated, while resisting the relativist conclusion: each perspective discloses a genuine aspect of the reality that the systematic convergence of perspectives is in turn able more completely to articulate. The corresponding programme of "vital reason" (razón vital) frames Ortega's broader alternative to both classical rationalism and contemporary positivism.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Jose Ortega y Gasset:
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
-
“Original: " La vida no puede esperar a que las ciencias expliquen científicamente el Universo . No se puede vivir ad kalendas graecas . El atributo más esencial de la existencia es su perentoriedad: la vida es siempre urgente. Se vive aquí y ahora sin posible demora ni traspaso. La vida nos es disparada a quemarropa. Ya la cultura, que no es sino su interpretación, no puede tampoco esperar.”
Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself. -
“Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.”
I am I and my circumstance , and if I don't save it I don't save myself. -
“Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.”
Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject , ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223