 The most important and obvious connection between intellectual currents in Europe and Ortega’s thought, then, was the influence of German philosophy and, in particular, his studies at the University of Marburg. Neo-Kantianism in general and Hermann Cohen in particular provided broad influence on the intellectual development of Ortega. He studied closely with both Cohen and Paul Natorp, and the former served as Ortega’s primary mentor. Ortega recalled this relationship in his “Prologue for Germans” (Obras, VIII: 13–58) where he referred to Cohen, in retrospect, as “my teacher”. Some of the critical influence of Marburg Neo-Kantianism is discernible in Ortega’s writings. An attempt to distinguish philosophy from the assumptions and assertions—whether idealistic or positivistic—of speculative metaphysics characterized his general philosophical position. Ortega rejected speculative metaphysical systems and, like Cohen, repudiated natural science’s approach to epistemology with its naturalistic and psychophysical explanations of sensible reality of the “subjective” idealists. Although Ortega hesitates to proceed as far as Cohen, that is, to postulate the “facts” of science to be determined completely by thought, a sort of Neo-Kantian metaphysics remains in his fundamental philosophical point of view. For instead of positing pure thought as solely real, Ortega replaced Cohen’s logic with the notion of “human life”. In other words, Ortega’s generalized view of existence contains human life in place of human logic as the underlying unifying principle of reality. Ortega’s major writings were concerned with the idea of life as the “dynamic dialogue between the individual and the world”; he was not concerned, as was Cohen, with assigning to external experience a reality that is contingent upon the principles of logic and mathematical physics. “The structure of life is futurition”, he wrote,