The essays and lectures that comprise this book reflect decades of work in the United States, Spain, and Spanish America. In no particular chronological sequence, these writings cluster in thematic unity around the innovative concepts of the shared vision of philosophers Ortega y Gasset and Julian Marias. These include, among others, human life as the radical reality, the indissoluble bond of person and circumstance, innovations of philosophic genre and lexicon, perspective as reality and history as reason, and beyond the reductive claims of modern biologism, realism, and idealism the unique reality of the human person as creation.

Harold Raley has written twenty-four books on philosophy, history, theological topics, and fiction, authored more than a hundred professional articles, delivered several dozen major lectures on philosophy, literature, and language, in addition to a decade of journalistic writing on language and intellectual topics. He has lectured in American and Canadian universities, at several venues in Spain, and lectured and taught in Colombia, South America. Raley has taught French, Spanish, and humanities. He has served as department chair at Oklahoma State University and the University of Houston, and as Dean of Fine Arts and Humanities at Houston Baptist University where he held the Robert H. Ray Chair of Humanities and was named Scholar- in-Residence.