José Ferrater Mora  José María Ferrater Mora (; 30 October 1912 – 30 January 1991) 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" (Dictionary of Philosophy, 1941) and "Being and Death: An Outline of Integrationist Philosophy" (1962). 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. 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 (his former doctoral student) in 1980. Ferrater Mora died from a heart attack, on 30 January 1991, while visiting Barcelona. 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.