Ortega y Gasset studied at Madrid University (1898–1904) and in Germany (1904–08) and was influenced by the neo-Kantian philosophical school at Marburg. As professor of metaphysics at Madrid (1910), however, he diverged from neo-Kantianism in such works as Adán en el paraíso (1910; “Adam in Paradise”), Meditaciones del Quijote (1914; “Quixote's Meditations”), and El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923; Modern Theme). He saw individual life as the fundamental reality: reason as a function of life is substituted for absolute reason, and for absolute truth he substituted the perspective of each individual (“I am I, and my circumstance”). He shared the preoccupation of his generation with Spain's problems. He founded the periodicals España (1915), El Sol (1917; “The Sun”), and Revista de Occidente (1923; “Review of the West”).

Between 1936 and 1945 he was a voluntary exile in Europe and Argentina, returning to Spain at the end of World War II. In 1948 he founded the Institute of Humanities in Madrid. Of his other works, the best known are España invertebrada (1922; Invertebrate Spain) and La rebelión de las masas (1929; The Revolt of the Masses), in which he characterized 20th-century society as dominated by masses of mediocre and indistinguishable individuals, who he proposed should surrender social leadership to minorities of cultivated and intellectually independent men.