José Gaos


José Gaos 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.

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, during the Spanish Civil War, 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 German 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, 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 are edited by the UNAM in Mexico City, where also the Gaos-Archive is located.

Selected publications