He was editor and contributor with Thelma Lavine on History and Anti-History in Philosophy (1989, 2012)[3] whose From Socrates to Sartre (1984)[4] was the basis for the PBS series of the same name.

Tejera attended St. Mary's College in Southampton, England, a boarding school, from 1930 to 1938, receiving his Matriculate (university entry status certificate) in London in 1939.

In his early career, Tejera held the following diplomatic posts: As a student at Columbia University, some of the principal teachers and direct influences on his work included the renowned intellectual and cultural historians John H. Randall Jr.,[9] Justus Buchler, Irwin Edman, Jacques Barzun, While a PhD candidate, he was graduate assistant to Irwin Edman.

He was profoundly affected by the writings of John Dewey and George Santayana, as well as by the work and literature of the New Critics John Crowe Ransom, His art and literary interests in New York City enabled encounters with noted artists, writers, and poets of the beat generation such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Fritz Stern, and artist Jacob Kainen, with whom he formed an enduring friendship.

A portrait of a mid-century gathering at Columbia University with Tejera was published in Fritz Stern's autobiography[15] including the authors, and republished in the New York Times.

Buchler was his dissertation adviser at Columbia when he wrote Philosophy and the Art of Poetry (1956),[19][20] and longtime colleague and correspondent.

Afterward he accepted a permanent position of Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY) campus at Stony Brook.

He renewed interest in a John Dewey's philosophy of culture with an emphasis on poetics and rhetoric, Buchler's coordinative analysis, and philosophic historiography.

This alignment with classic American Philosophy also contrasts with the cognitivist aesthetics of Phenomenology which turns the aesthetic object into a cognitive object while failing to recognize its dimension of feeling, or the cognitive gain available in art as art in the fullest sense which both Charles S. Peirce and Justus Buchler defend.

He attends to the tone in which Plato's Socrates addresses his interlocutors to obtain satirical effects by persistent dialogical wit, humor and irony, often missed by readers.

His published works on Plato establish that the dialogues are satirical of Spartan militarism and Pythagorean intellectuality, as well as of faction (reactionary dissent, partisanship, etc.)

With the utility of Tejera's conventions, modern scholars have the advantage of addressing such dilemmas in a progressive and orderly fashion, whether from classicist, philosophical and historical orientations.

In 1986, he was Program Director for the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy conference honoring John H. Randall Jr., and Herbert W. Schneider.