Book: What is Philosophy?

Overview
José Ortega y Gasset presents philosophy as a human, historical, and deeply practical enterprise rather than as a closed, purely speculative discipline. He argues that philosophy begins from life itself and from the concrete facts of human existence, and that its purpose is to clarify the conditions and meanings that make human life comprehensible. Philosophy is shown not as a mere set of doctrines but as a living search that shapes how individuals and societies see the world.

Philosophy as "vital reason"
Ortega insists that reason must be rooted in life: thought must answer the "radical problems" that arise from personal circumstance. He opposes an abstraction of reason that detaches from human concerns, proposing instead a "vital reason" that takes the ebb and flow of history, culture, and individual situation as its point of departure. Philosophical reflection is therefore an extension of a person's life-project, an effort to render one's existence intelligible and to widen the horizon from which one acts and judges.

Critique of systems and the scientific model
A sustained theme is resistance to treating philosophy as if it were another empirical science or as a system-building exercise whose value is only in producing technical results. Ortega distinguishes the aims of science and philosophy: science isolates and clarifies fragments of reality; philosophy seeks a coherent understanding of the whole human situation. He criticizes dogmatism, whether metaphysical or positivistic, and rejects the idea that philosophy should reduce itself to methodical or procedural rules. Instead he emphasizes interpretation, perspective, and the provisional nature of philosophical answers.

Approaches and perspectives
The book examines and engages with a variety of philosophical traditions, evaluating their contributions and limits from the standpoint of life-centered reflection. Rationalism and empiricism are weighed for how they illuminate particular dimensions of reality but are judged inadequate when they ignore the lived context. Idealist, existential, and phenomenological strains receive attention as attempts to recapture experience, meaning, and human finitude. Ortega's own emphasis on perspectivism reframes truth as plural and historically situated, insisting that a complete philosophy must accommodate multiplicity of viewpoints without collapsing into relativism.

Method and the role of experience
Ortega advocates for a philosophical method that privileges clarification, concrete description, and reformulation of "problems" rather than the deduction of axioms. Direct intellectual experience, intuition of life's urgencies, and imaginative empathy are treated as legitimate sources of insight. Philosophy, in this account, cultivates a heightened sensitivity to contradictions, tensions, and possibilities within one's circumstance; it is an exercise in seeing what had been overlooked and in reorienting judgments and priorities accordingly.

Significance and legacy
Philosophy, for Ortega, is an indispensable human activity because it shapes the frameworks through which individuals and societies live. Its worth lies in enlarging perspectives, renewing commitments, and providing a reflective purchase on existence. The work stands as a call for a philosophy that is simultaneously rigorous and human, capable of keeping thought tethered to life's moving dynamics. Its influence persists in discussions that seek to bridge abstract theorizing with existential concerns and in efforts to reclaim philosophy as a form of cultural and personal self-understanding.