Who was he?

Josep Ferrater Mora (1912-1991) was born in Barcelona on October 30, 1912 and died on January 30, 1991. After studying Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, defeat in the Spanish Civil War took him first to Paris and then to Cuba and Chile. In 1949, he settled permanently in the United States where he developed a long university teaching and research assignment at Bryn Mawr College until 1981. He was a visiting professor of many American and European universities and he was named Doctor Honoris Causa by several of these institutions. He is the author of the famous Diccionario de Filosofía (latest version, digitized and expanded, 2020) and many other philosophical works, among which we can highlight El ser y la muerte (Being and death), Fundamentos de Filosofía (Fundamentals of Philosophy), Cambio de marcha en filosofía (Change of Progress in Philosophy) and De la materia a la razón (From Matter to Reason). He is also the author of several novels. Ferrater Mora is unanimously considered as the most internationally recognized Catalan philosopher of the 20th century.

Here you can see a series of interviews with Ferrater Mora on TVE:

Finally, we will be able to see the graphic testimony of the moment when José Ferrater Mora was invested Doctor Honoris Causa in the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona, on 13 May 1988.


Audiovisual Archive