 In 1938, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), he relocated to Mexico and taught as professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico/UNAM.He was influenced by neo-scholasticism, neo-Kantianism and Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, in addition to German philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann and, first and foremost, by his teacher, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.Other teachers were philosophers Manuel García Morente and Xavier Zubiri.