This article analyses José Ortega y Gasset’s ideas of the tasks of philosophy and the university and how they were related to his diagnosis of the crisis of modern European culture. The texts ’Misión de la universidad’, ’Qué es filosofía?’ and ’La rebelión de las masas’, all written around 1930, are interpreted in light of each other to expose this relationship. Instead of simply declaring tasks for philosophy and the university, Ortega turned these issues into objects of historico-philosophical analysis. The tasks of philosophy and the university were historicized, corresponding to their changing roles in society, and related to the demands of the new situation in the present. The character of the present was not simply determined by applying a ready-made understanding of society, but was itself made an object of historico-philosophical diagnosis. The tasks that Ortega formulated for philosophy (to formulate a new form of reason related to life; to analyse the fundamental structure of ’life’ in the present) and the university (to transmit culture at the level of cultural development; to build a new cultural foundation as a vital system of ideas based on the current level of the disciplines; to act as a cultivating counter-balance to the power of the media) can be seen as part of the solution to the problems diagnosed in ’La rebelión de las masas’: the loss of the former cultural foundation; violence and nihilistic lack of respect for basic norms of civilization; self-righteous presentism and narrow-minded specialization. The final part points to worrying parallels between Ortega’s diagnosis and our contemporary populist condition and raises the question of a future alternative: a philosophical condition with a philosophical democracy based on philosophical citizens. Whether this is possible or not, Ortega’s analysis demonstrates the need to relate the question of the tasks of philosophy and the university to a diagnosis of the present.