Ortega, phenomenology and idealism

This chapter evaluates Ortega’s philosophy at the beginning of the 1930s, after his 1929 masterpiece What is Philosophy? We will focus on the three editions of the Course Lessons on Metaphysics according to Vital Reason, in 1932–1933, 1934–1935, and 1935–1936. We will also mention the originally unpublished “Prologue to Germans” from 1934 and make some glimpses to the unfinished The Idea of Principle in Leibniz, which Ortega began to write in his Lisbon residence. If, on the one hand, idealism (especially of the Neokantian kind) was always the target of Ortega’s criticisms since 1912, phenomenology seemed, at least until 1929, to offer him a good alternative as a realistic-oriented doctrine of essences. Against the constructivism of the Neokantians, making reality dependent on the subjective activity of the transcendental Ego, phenomenology was backed by intuition and the search for ultimate evidences.