Jose Ortega y Gasset created a systematic philosophy of history, the importance and relevance of which this thesis attempts to establish. The study begins with a survey of Ortega's life and works. Then it presents the basic concepts of his philosophical and sociological thought in order to place his historical work in the proper perspective. The aim is not the reconstruction of Ortega's philosophical system, a project which would take too much time and space, and one which is beyond the intent of this inquiry; the aim is instead to present the part of that system that deals with "history" in the Ortegan sense. The study presents Ortega's idea of history as a systematic reality that can be approached in a rational way. It also presents his theory of historical change by means of the mass-minority polarization within each generation, the attempt by Ortega to use such a theory as a method of historical research, and finally, what Ortega called "the crisis of the twentieth century."The study closes with a critical assessment of Ortega's work, pointing out how other thinkers might have influenced him, and looking into the relevance of his historical work from the point of view of the philosophy of history in the twentieth century.

"Shakespeare on the Verge: Rhetoric, Tragedy, and the Paradox of Place" describes the ideological geographies of Renaissance England and reads the ways "place" was rhetorically constructed in two of Shakespeare's late tragedies. By ideological geographies I mean the way in which Renaissance men and women understood spatially the constitution of their world--their spatialized "habits of thought." These habits were then undergoing a change from seeing the world as a vertical hierarchy of interrelated and dependent places to seeing it as a horizontal array of discrete places related to one another in a linear manner. Working from the theories of Agamben, Burke, Foucault, and Ong, I argue that Shakespeare constructs a paradox of place in which hierarchically elevated places subsume inferior ones and thereby double them. The paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is the king's mobile court, known at the time as the "Verge," which subsumed the places, the actual palaces and castles, of the king's subjects as it progressed across the kingdom. This phenomenon is paradoxical because, although the king's superior place subsumed those below it, it was always dependent on those inferior places, both logically (there can be no king without his subjects) and materially (as the king traveled, his household relied on the provisions supplied by subjects along the way). This paradox leads Shakespeare to double certain dramatic characters and their environments. It also leads him to set up oppositions between places constructed through violent means and places constructed through the "violence" of rhetoric. In my chapter on King Lear (1605), I argue that Edmund should be read as Lear's double, a doubling made manifest especially in the characters' stage movements as they effectively change places with one another. In Coriolanus (1608), I argue that its hero rejects his double, the Plebeian class of Rome, but that he eventually attempts to reconcile with them in large measure by changing his use of rhetoric. In my reading of these plays, as in my description of Renaissance ideological geographies, I aim to revise the way people look at place on the Shakespearean stage and at the complex interplay in them between physical violence and rhetorical action. / text

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John Rawls's political liberalism has shaped contemporary political philosophy. Three other theories, feminism, republicanism, and communitarianism, devote a good deal of space to refuting Rawls's theory, and claim to be superior alternatives to it. My main thesis is that they are not alternatives to Rawls's political liberalism but variations of it. That is, although these theories present themselves as external critiques of liberalism, they are ultimately internal critiques, because their own theories are built upon the basic principles of liberalism. This is not to deny that many of their criticisms are well-taken and thus need to be addressed by liberal theorists. I also argue that Rawls's theory of political liberalism is in general terms correct. It needs however to be revised in other to solve what I take to be its main problem: Its lack of a foundation. In my dissertation I propose a revised version of political liberalism, which includes an argument in support of the political liberal conception of justice.