José Ortega y Gasset and Jaime Benítez Rexach. The meeting in Aspen, 1949.

Abstract

This article investigates how University of Chicago Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins and his colleagues organized an International transatlantic event in 1949 in the small town of Aspen, Colorado. Hutchins invited José Ortega y Gasset, then intellectually renowned in United States academic circles, and Albert Schweitzer as keynote speakers. This cultural event was widely promoted using modern public relations techniques that made the speakers known to a wide audience in the United States. Hutchins invited the rector of the University of Puerto Rico Jaime Benítez Rexach, who considered himself a disciple of Ortega. It was in this context that Ortega and Benítez met for the first time. This meeting between the important networks of Hutchins, Ortega and Benítez and the subsequent trip to New York, where Ortega met the newly elected governor Luis Muñoz Marín, is investigated.