José Gaos

Works

• 1952On Mexican Philosophy

  Lectures arguing that a philosophy can be national without ceasing to be philosophy and that the history of ideas in Mexico deserves study in its own right.

• 1958Professional Confessions

  An intellectual autobiography of the philosopher as a teacher, from Madrid to Mexico, and a reflection on philosophy as a personal confession.

Position

Gaos is on the map as the mediator who carried Ortega’s philosophy and German phenomenology to Mexico and as a founder of the history of ideas in Spanish America. He held that philosophy cannot escape its own history or the person who practises it: in his “philosophy of philosophy” every system appears as the expression, even the confession, of a personality, a view that brought him close to a sceptical historicism. From Ortega’s idea of circumstance he drew the programme of studying the thought of Spain and Spanish America in its own right, including essayists and political writers whom academic philosophy had ignored; he spoke of “thought in the Spanish language” rather than of a national philosophy. His translations gave Spanish-speaking readers access to German philosophy early: “El ser y el tiempo” appeared eleven years before the first English translation of “Being and Time”. His student Leopoldo Zea built on his approach a Latin American philosophy of history, while others, such as Luis Villoro, took his rigour in other directions. His thesis that every philosophy is a personal confession raises the question, discussed by his readers, of how philosophy can still claim truth; his Mexican programme was meant to widen the canon, not to close it within national borders.

Life & context

José Gaos was born on 26 December 1900 in Gijón in Asturias. He studied philosophy in Madrid, where Ortega y Gasset and Manuel García Morente were his teachers, and took his doctorate with a thesis on Husserl’s critique of psychologism. With García Morente he translated Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” (1929). After teaching at the University of Zaragoza he became professor in Madrid, and in 1936, at the start of the Civil War, he was appointed rector of the Universidad Central. In 1938 he went to Mexico at the invitation of La Casa de España, later El Colegio de México, and stayed for the rest of his life; he described himself not as an exile (desterrado) but as a “transterrado”, someone transplanted to another country of the same language. He taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and at El Colegio de México, where his seminars trained a generation of historians of ideas, among them Leopoldo Zea, and the young philosophers of the Hiperión group, such as Luis Villoro and Emilio Uranga. He translated many works of German philosophy, including Hegel and Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (1951). He died in Mexico City on 10 June 1969.

Further main works

• Philosophy of Philosophy and History of Philosophy (Filosofía de la filosofía e historia de la filosofía, 1947)
• On Philosophy (De la filosofía, 1962)
• Translation: Being and Time (Heidegger, El ser y el tiempo, 1951)