Centre for European Studies at Lund Univerity

(with Ángel Sahuquillo). She is now preparing a book on Spanish intellectuals. 3José Ortega y Gasset José Ortega y Gasset is the only Spanish philosopher whose name is generally known to a wider international public. He belongs to the earlier European tradition associated with the eighteenth-century French “philosophes” characterised by broad intellectual and social interests and a talent for writing well. He also embodies the typical situation of Spanish intellectuals whose lives, up to these last twenty or thirty years, have always been marked by the economic and political backwardness of the their country. Despite his huge popularity in Spanish-speaking countries over many decades, his work is not as well known as one might think, neither in Spain nor in the rest of Europe. The two main reasons may be that he had a broad range of interests so that his work does not today belong to a specific field and, secondly