Background
Gaos y Gonzalez Pola, José was born in 1900 in Gijon, Spain.
Gaos y Gonzalez Pola, José was born in 1900 in Gijon, Spain.
Philosophy under Ortega and Garcia Mo rente, Madrid (doctorate on Husserl, 1928). hifls: Garcia Morente, Ortega, Zubiri, Bergson and Husserl.
Held a number of important Appointments in Spain before the Civil War, notably Professor at Zaragoza (1930) and Rector of the University of Madrid ( 1936-1939). At the end of the Civil War, moved to Mexico as Professor at UNAM, then at Nuevo Leon (1941), with other appointments in Cuba and Guatemala.
José Gaos is regarded as one of the most influential Spanish philosophical scholars of his generation. He translated many volumes of philosophy into Spanish, notably by Dewey, Hartmann. Heidegger. Husserl. Jaspers and Wahl, and compiled a number of anthologies in addition to writing his own historical and philosophical studies. His own views, as he candidly notes, changed on a number of occasions, from neo-Kantianism to phenomenology to ratiovitalism and finally to the ‘personist’ relativism of his mature works. His great historical learning is reflected in this outlook, which is largely concerned with the nature of philosophy itself, a subject Gaos calls ‘la filosofía de la filosofía'. Gaos drew a number of conclusions from his studies of the history of Western philosophy, of which the most important was that no philosophical system has yet been devised which does justice to the multifariousness and complexity of phenomena. As he puts it, ‘La metafísica ha concluido.. en el fracaso’. The contradictions of the various worldviews advanced in the twenty centuries of Western thought are a manifestation of human intellectual finitude, the recognition of which. Gaos contends, is the only sound starting-point for philosophy. Further, no philosophy is acceptable which does not recognize the following: that even the most fundamental categories of thought are historical and mutable; that these categories are antinomial in nature, a feature Gaos attributes to their being covertly rooted in the contrary passions of love and hatred; and that the object of philosophy, i.e. existence, is concrete and subjective. Philosophers conceive their ideas in response to their circumstances; hence ‘personist’. Unsurprisingly, Gaos holds that there are no absolute values. Rather, values are projections of the life of the subjects who are human individuals. Gaos’s belief that basic categories reflect passions led him to carry out extensive work in an area he calls philosophical anthropology, and some of his most original work is to be found in the phenomenological and psychological analyses thus generated. Thus he attempts to identify distinguishing properties of human nature, and finds these in the hand and in time. He spends much time analysing the nature of the caress, finding in it evidence not of a tendency to sensuality but on the contrary of the existence of spirit. Concerning time, Gaos argues that life and time are inseparable concepts. We exist only because we must one day cease to exist. We are oriented towards the future, and mortality lends urgency to our lives. His recognition of intellectual finitude prevents him from giving a view on the existence of god.