José Gaos (26 December 1900 in Gijón, Spain – 10 June 1969 in Mexico City) was a Spanish philosopher who obtained political asylum in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the most important Mexican philosophers of the 20th century.
Gaos grew up in Valencia and Oviedo in Spain. His dissertation dealt with the problem of psychologism. He then became philosophy professor in León, at the University of Zaragoza and, since 1933, at the University of Madrid. In 1938, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he relocated to Mexico and taught as professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico/UNAM. He was influenced by neo-scholasticism, neo-Kantianism and Husserl's phenomenology, in addition to German philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann and, first and foremost, by his teacher, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Other teachers were philosophers Manuel García Morente and Xavier Zubiri.
Gaos also was a prolific translator of German philosophy, contributing to the translation projects of the School of Madrid that had been set up by Ortega. Gaos translated to Spanish the books of philosophers such as: Martin Heidegger (the first Spanisch translation of Being and Time), John Dewey, Søren Kierkegaard, G. W. F. Hegel, Max Scheler, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Edmund Husserl.