Short answers, pulled from the story.
José Ortega y Gasset is best known for The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, which made him internationally famous. In it, he defended meritocratic liberalism against attacks from both communists and right-wing populists, and the book has been widely regarded as a conservative classic.
The phrase, which translates as 'I am me and my circumstance,' first appeared in Meditaciones del Quijote in 1914 and remained central to Ortega y Gasset's philosophy throughout his life. It expresses his argument that the self and its surrounding world cannot be separated, and that lived individual life is the only genuine starting point for understanding reality.
Ratiovitalism, or raciovitalismo, is the philosophical theory Ortega y Gasset coined to describe a system in which knowledge is grounded in the radical reality of life, with reason as an essential component of that life rather than its governing force. He introduced it in History as a System, first published in English in 1935.
Ortega y Gasset left Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War and spent years in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, before returning to Europe in 1942. He privately expressed hostility to the Franco regime after his return to Madrid in 1948, stating that the regime did not deserve anyone's confidence and that his beliefs were incompatible with Franco.
Mildred Adams translated the main body of Ortega y Gasset's work into English, including Invertebrate Spain, Man and Crisis, What is Philosophy?, Some Lessons in Metaphysics, and An Interpretation of Universal History. The Revolt of the Masses was translated twice: first in 1932 by a translator generally accepted to be J.R. Carey, and again in 1985 by Anthony Kerrigan, with an introduction by Saul Bellow.
The Ortega hypothesis, drawn from a passage in The Revolt of the Masses, holds that average or mediocre scientists contribute substantially to the advancement of science. It is named for José Ortega y Gasset and has generated its own scholarly debate in the philosophy of science.