José Ferrater Mora


José María Ferrater Mora was a Catalan philosopher, essayist and writer. He is considered the most prominent Catalan philosopher of the 20th-century and was the author of over 35 books, including a four-volume Diccionario de filosofía and Being and Death: An Outline of Integrationist Philosophy. Subjects he worked on include ontology, history of philosophy, metaphysics, anthropology, the philosophy of history and culture, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, and ethics. He also directed several films.
Ferrater Mora was known for his inclusion of humans and non-human animals within the same moral sphere, or continuum, arguing that the difference was one of degree, not kind; the Ferrater Mora Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics is named in his honour.

Biography

Ferrater Mora was born in 1912, in Barcelona, Spain. He studied at Santa Maria del Collell, then at the University of Barcelona, where he earned a BA, in 1932, and his BPhil, in 1936.
During the Spanish Civil War, he enlisted in the Republican Army, serving as an intelligence clerk, before escaping the country in 1939. In exile, he spent three months in Paris, before moving to and lecturing in Havana, Cuba and Santiago, Chile.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, he moved to the United States, first residing in New York City. In 1949, Ferrater Mora was hired by Bryn Mawr College to teach philosophy and Spanish literature, where he worked till his retirement, in 1981. He married Priscilla Cohn in 1980.
Ferrater Mora died from a heart attack, on 30 January 1991, while visiting Barcelona.

Philosophy

Ferrater Mora is the creator of a philosophical method he called integrationism, with which he sought to integrate opposite systems of thought. He argued that irreducible concepts, which are the source of many disputes and divisions in philosophy, do not denote existing realities in themselves but are "limit concepts"; that is to say, these "opposite poles" do not exist absolutely. They exist only as trends or directions of reality and therefore are complementary and are useful to talk about it.
His philosophical work also focused on questions of an ontological nature. He called his ontological position "monism sui generis", since it unites monism and pluralism; it is an emergentism in which the elements assemble themselves by virtue of their properties or functions, or properties-functions. Each structure, although it depends to exist on the elements that compose it, is not reducible to them because it acquires new properties-functions that cannot be explained based on those of the element. The structure also becomes an element for a new structure. Self-assembly begins from the physical level to the point where structures acquire more complex properties-functions and of a different order to give rise to a new biological level, and thus the continuum progresses until reaching the social and then the cultural level. It is a continuum that does not break and that goes from matter to reason.
He was one of the first philosophers to introduce applied ethics to the Spanish-speaking world and was a staunch supporter of animal rights.
His works combine a wide variety of influences, including the Spanish philosophers Miguel de Unamuno, Eugeni d'Ors and José Ortega y Gasset and numerous other representatives of both continental and analytic philosophy.

Legacy

In January 1991, Ferrater Mora made public the decision to donate his personal library to the University of Girona. The collection consists of 7,255 books, 156 journal titles and correspondence, with 6,748 letters. The correspondence includes letters between Ferrater Mora and his friends, politicians and intellectuals of the time. This collection also includes letters from his departure into exile in the 1940s, until his death in 1991. Other documents of interest include related writings, with politics and culture sent by personalities of the time: Xavier Benguerel, Enrique Tierno Galván, Néstor Almendros and Josep Trueta, among many others.
Founded in 1989, the Ferrater Mora Chair in Contemporary Thought, regularly organizes seminars and lessons on contemporary philosophy.

Selected works

The following works are in Spanish, unless otherwise noted: