Perhaps it is true that the public persona somehow hides the private person, perhaps it is difficult to know someone whose wit and irony is so marked that one cannot always easily see if underneath there is a shy, gentle, and vulnerable person or maybe we simply refuse to give up our stereotype of the cool, calm and collected intellectual. Perhaps the very keenness of Ferrater Mora's thinking led some to believe that he was dispassionate since we tend to contrast passion with intellect as if they are incompatible: we think of a passionate person as emotional and perhaps even somewhat irrational, while we view an intellectual as rational, unemotional, and detached. An intellectual, however, is not necessarily lacking in passion. An intellectual might well have a passionate regard for ideas, as well as other things.

Certainly Ferrater Mora was intellectual, but whether he fit the stereotype of an intellectual is another matter. The problem with stereotypes is that they are often exaggerated or simply false, and the problem with seeing Ferrater Mora through the lens of this stereotype is that frequently he did not seem to fit: he was too irreverent, too ironic, too bursting with life to be a "proper intellectual." He himself explained that there is a huge difference between being intellectual and being pedantic and that the two were often confused. He did not admire pedants. He may have been, as Miro Quesada argued, a super rationalist in his thinking, but he was neither cold nor indifferent. A colleague at Bryn Mawr who had known Ferrater Mora for years remarked on his death that she had never learned to tell when he was serious and when he was not, but Ferrater Mora offered a guide: If I sound serious, then I am joking; if I sound as if I am joking, I may not be.