The winner of that title would be a tough one to judge, but I certainly appreciate this bit of knowledge on Jose. I've got to look into this.

Nietzsche is arguably a meta-philosopher as well. Also Hegel. I suppose its a matter of explicit versus implicit.

Regards

I agree that Nietzsche did do metaphilosophy, but he was not explicit when he did dive into this area. Nietzsche was not explicit when he did any of his writing, and kind of left codes for his readers to follow.

I do highly recommend What is Philosophy? by Ortega along with his more intro to philosophy--The Origins of Philosophy. Pretty much anything by Ortega is grossly overlooked because he was not English, French, or German.

What I want to do is the exact opposite of an introduction to philosophy: it is to take the philosophic activity itself, philosophizing itself, and submit it to basic analysis. So far as I know, this, strange as it may seem, has never been done; certainly it has not been done with the degree of resolution which we are now going to apply to it. (What is philosophy? (Norton, 1961), p. 18-19)

But what Ortega says here is simply false. Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein all subjected philosophical activity to analysis. Not to mention Plato in his Republic, as well as John Locke in his Essay. Wittgenstein, in fact, believed that the master question of philosophy was, "What is philosophy?" and believed that if that question could be answered (and he thought he did answer it) then most all the question of philosophy would then fall into place and be answered.

That was a major factor. Another reason is that his major works were not published, let alone translated into other languages, until after his death, due to his general temerity in publishing books until he was fully satisfied with them. Also, as John T. Graham, the author of a three volume series of books on his thought, discovered, much of his philosophy, theory of history, and sociology was influenced by Pragmatism, and especially by William James, but he had to hide that fact. As Graham says in his first book:

"Why did not Ortega acknowledge at the beginning that he had adapted James's "radical empiricism" for his own "new way of thinking"? Already in 1908 he had proposed (in jest) to be a "pragmatist," but he was not prepared to confess any debt until almost the end of his life. To fathom the motives for his secrecy, we can only hypothesize--circumstantially and even sympathetically. After the bitter crisis of 1898 [the Spanish-American War], "pragmatism" had a bad name in Spain. Would Spaniards have accepted for the honored chair of metaphysics at the Central University in 1910 a young professor who admitted taking his principles of reality (if not of truth) from the grossly "pragmatic" Yankee victors? If he wished to serve his country as a philosopher, he could not do so and agree openly with James on metaphysical realism." (A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset, p. 42)

[See John T. Graham, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1994); Theory of History in Ortega y Gasset: 'The Dawn of Historical Reason' (Ibid., 1997); and, most recently, The Social Thought of Ortega y Gasset: A Systematic Synthesis in Postmodernism and Interdisciplinarity (Ibid., 2001). However, these books require a detailed knowledge of Ortega's thought and works.]