Biography:José Gaos

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Short description: Spanish philosopher

José Gaos (26 December 1900, Gijón, Spain – 10 June 1969, Mexico City) was a Spanish philosopher who obtained political asylum in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the most important Mexican philosophers of the 20th century. He was a member of the Madrid School.[1]

Biography

Gaos grew up in Valencia and Oviedo in Spain. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the problem of psychologism. He then became philosophy professor in León, at the University of Zaragoza and, since 1933, at the University of Madrid. In 1938,[2] during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), he relocated to Mexico and taught as professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico/UNAM. He was influenced by neo-scholasticism, neo-Kantianism and Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, in addition to Germany philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann and, first and foremost, by his teacher, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Other teachers were philosophers Manuel García Morente and Xavier Zubiri.

Gaos also was a prolific translator of German philosophy, contributing to the translation projects of the School of Madrid that had been set up by Ortega. Gaos translated to Spanish the books of philosophers such as: Martin Heidegger (the first Spanish translation of Being and Time), John Dewey, Søren Kierkegaard, G. W. F. Hegel, Max Scheler, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Edmund Husserl.

Leopoldo Zea was a notable student of Gaos.

Gaos's Collected Works (Obras completas) are edited by the UNAM in Mexico City, where also the Gaos-Archive is located.[3]

Selected publications

  • La filosofía de Maimónides (1940)
  • El pensamiento hispanoamericano (1944)
  • Dos exclusivas del hombre: la mano y el tiempo (1945)
  • Antología del pensamiento en lengua española en la edad contemporánea (1945)
  • Filosofía de la filosofía (1947)
  • Método para resolver los problemas de nuestro tiempo (1950)
  • Introducción a El ser y el tiempo de Martin Heidegger (1951)
  • En torno a la filosofía mexicana (1952)
  • Filosofía mexicana en nuestros días (1954)
  • La filosofía en la universidad (1956)
  • Ensayos sobre Ortega y Gasset' (1957)
  • Confesiones profesionales (1958)
  • Discurso de filosofía (1959)
  • Orígenes de la filosofía y su historia (1960)
  • Filosofía contemporánea (1962)
  • Historia de nuestra idea del mundo (1973)

References

  1. A. Pablo Iannone, Dictionary of World Philosophy', Routledge, 2013, p. 328: "Madrid School".
  2. Pio Colonello (1997): The Philosophy of José Gaos, Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, p. 17.
  3. See the website of the Gaos Archive (Archivo Gaos) at http://www.filosoficas.unam.mx/~gaos/fondo.php.

External links