Background
Ferrater Mora, José Maria was born in 1912 in Barcelona.
Ferrater Mora, José Maria was born in 1912 in Barcelona.
PhD, Philosophy, University of Barcelona, under Joaquin Xirau, 1931-1936.
Left Spain after the Civil War, living first in France, then as a teacher at universities in Havana and Chile (1939-1947). Last major academic appointments at Bryn Mawr College and at Girona.
Ferrater Mora’s place in twentieth-century philosophy rests not only on his own philosophy of integrationism, but also on his enormous erudition, put to good use in his role as a cultural mediator. In addition to his works of original philosophy, Ferrater Mora produced single-handed a formidable Diccionario de filosofa (1941), and works in which he introduced current English-speaking philosophy to the Hispanic world, e.g. Cambio de marcha en filosofo [Change of Gear in Philosophy], a survey of philosophical analysis. Both his circumstances as an émigré and his intellectual tolerance fitted him well for this role, and also inform his integrationism. While given this designation only in the major later works, the spirit behind it appears also in the significant works of his middle period, for example, El hombre en la encrucijada [Man at the Crossroads] (1952). Here Ferrater Mora identifies four concepts he held to be ineludible in philosophical discussions of the human condition: God, Nature, Society and Man. The current ‘crossroads’ consists in the unique modern predicament of being uncertain as to the significance of all of them. Whatever resolution of this difficulty is arrived at, Ferrater Mora insists that it will be successful only if it is flexible, yet does not exclude any of these elements from due consideration. Integrationism rests on an ontology and epistemology which is set out in El ser y la muerte [Being and Death] (1962). The central thesis of this work is that fundamental concepts such as matter, spirit, nature or consciousness, often taken to designate absolutes, do not in fact designate features of reality. Rather, they designate limiting cases. They constitute a catégorial framework whose function is to permit experience of the world, which can be grasped only in their terms. This thesis is developed further in El sery el sentido [Being and Meaning] (1968), in which these two concepts are used as the basis of an analysis of all there is. All such frameworks are revisable and replaceable. Here, as elsewhere, Ferrater Mora eschews all dogmatism. If all major philosophical disjunctions are composed of revisable concepts, then perhaps Iheir apparent opposition can be dissolved; such is the belief behind integrationism, which is not a set °f doctrines but a method of analysing seemingly contrary concepts, with a view to demonstrating their complementarity. Integrationism is a means of integrating concepts by analysing their functions. By the use of this method, Ferrater Mora hoped to reconcile what he discerned as the major bifurcation in philosophical thought, that between systems in which human concerns are central and systems in which Nature as a whole ls central, each of which alone he regarded as at best a partial repository of truth. The notion of revisability figures strongly in his late work on linguistic analysis. When told by analytical thinkers that such and such a question Is unaskable because it figures in no language game or ‘breaks the limits of language’, Ferrater Mora’s response was; which language? Language ls flexible and eminently revisable, and no Demiurge has fixed its patterns forever.