One Hundred Years of <i>The Theme of our Time</i>: a very open Horizon

Abstract

The aim is to analyze the place occupied by El tema in Ortega’s work as a whole, on his way towards the so-called “Second Navigation”, that is, towards his philosophy of maturity. After contextualizing the book in the European culture of the time, describing the novelties that took place around 1921-23 and the historical situation Spain was going through, in the midst of the crisis of the Restoration system, we enter into the examination of the nuclear concepts such as “life”, “generation”, “rationalism”, “perspectivism”, around which Ortega elaborates his philosophical proposal. The great questions of European culture –political, moral, sense of history– must be examined in the new light of vital reason, the formulas of pure reason having been exhausted. Finally, we proceed to a critical evaluation of the theme. Ortega does not succeed in renewing the nuclear idea of “human life” because he still depends on a naturalistic approach and entrusts the foundation of vital reason to a new science and not to a first philosophy, as he will propose from the courses and texts of the 1930s.