 Ortega was quite sensitive to implications drawn on the affinities between his work and Heidegger’s, which, in part, explains his efforts to trace the originality of his formulations to his Meditations. Apart from a general discussion in his Idea of Principle in Leibniz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory (Obras, VIII: 270–300), and the essay “Martin Heidegger and Language of the Philosophers”(Universitas, 7(9) [1952]: 897–903, Obras, IX: 625–44), Ortega referred to Heidegger only in passing in a long footnote in his essay, “Goethe from Within” (1932) Obras, 4: 403–04, 541. Whatever the context in which this controversy over Ortega’s intellectual indebtedness to Heidegger may have been initiated, it was during this decisive period of the 1930s that he turned to the systematic formulation of the philosophy of Lebensphilosophie, and it was also in this period that Ortega’s explicit postulation of the notion “I am I and my circumstances”, as radical reality, reflected the influence of existential and phenomenological points of view in his philosophy of existence, man and society.