Doing Philosophy in the Philippines: Fifty Years Ago and Fifty Years from Now – a Review Journal

Michael Kevin Edgar B. Mangao 1POL3 A Review Journal on Karunungan for Logic Alfredo P. Co Doing Philosophy in the Philippines: Fifty Years Ago and Fifty Years from Now A Review Journal The Article centers on the flourish of Philosophy in the Philippines, how it became popular, and how it is connected to an issue of our history and culture as Filipinos.

The first part, which is also considered as the prologue of the article, tells us of the 1972 graduate students particularly in the University of Santo Tomas who decided at once to form a group bent on widening Philosophical knowledge, to learn more on the different Philosophies of other Universities, and to see Philosophy in the Philippines in an even broader and much more collaborative scale. This group was known as the Philosophy Circle of the Philippines which, until now, remains active and participative in Philosophical events.Other groups like the Philosophical Association of the Philippines and the Philippine Academy of Philosophical Research was formed with different objectives but in regard to Philosophy all the same. The article expressed how exciting it has been in the founding days of the Philosophy Circle of the Philippines and how the different sectors of scholars cooperated and spoke with collaboration and contradiction to the different opinions of the popular group.Thus, the group attained its primary objective: To diversify Philosophy in the Philippines, to free it from the walls of monotony in which we only learn a particular Philosophy in which we are home to and fail to see the other Philosophies developed. To make this clearer, this particular group wanted to unify Philosophy in the Philippines into one which will be agreeable to everyone. This part of the article offers a good introduction one of which that introduces us to what we will read in the succeeding text.

It also gave helpful info and a good insight to which it mentioned clearly of the Philosophy Circle of the Philippines and its objectives. I find that objective creative and agreeable. Given the state of Philosophy in their time, it was absolutely necessary for a collaboration, for a much broader learning, and for this subject to become diverse and complex given the ideas the different Universities had. The next part questions in us the beginning or origin of philosophy in our country.This is started by a brief discussion of how our nation, the Philippines, was formed and how the Spaniards even spawned that name. It was said that unlike China and Japan, we had no established culture. Our homeland was merely a vast group of islands and the people who lived were of different tribes.

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It is possible that we lacked so many things the Chinese and Japanese had. We even lacked a unifying language. That was until the Spaniards came and decided to conquer us. This, sadly as the article considered, is the only start of our history as Filipinos.Almost everything in our Culture was adopted from Spain: Our names, our manners, our deeds, and even our way of thinking. The article then opens up the real subject: The birth of Philosophical knowledge in the Philippines. The Spaniards brought with them their own knowledge of Philosophy.

What they brought was then called the Thomistic Philosophy. This study was taught in Spanish particularly to seminarians. Thus, the University of Santo Thomas was established and opened this to her students. One fine and great teacher, as meant in the article, was the Spanish Dominican Fr.Angel de Blas, OP who was a teacher to many of the brilliant students of UST. This started the reign of the Filipino Philosophy teachers and thus accelerated the growing knowledge of Filipinos in the art and science of Philosophy. Our Philosophical Ideas getting more and more complex.

Although UST has become popular, two new Universities followed up namely, Far Eastern University and University of the Philippines. They too had then made a feat in the teaching of Philosophy. This collaborated a brief history of our country and how it stumbled upon the study of Philosophy.The writing is very much informative and it has the creativeness to combine history and a critical affirmation of how poor our homeland was in terms of culture before the Spanish colonization. As a Filipino, it is a bother to see that we are just a carbon copy, an adaptation of our colonizers. But if we put some sensible light in it, we are unique in some way. This was expressed in the article of which gave me the slight enlightenment to think about it again and then I thought that this author has a point.

Although we often mimic the cultures of others, we are a collaboration of cultures and we manage to make it stable: no conflicts, we ccept the ideas of others, we definitely minimize racism, we respect the beliefs of others, and in general, we do not care of being a mixed breed for we think of ourselves as unique and complex in line with that. These two parts, which I consider the third and the fourth and last part respectively talks about how we Filipinos engage ourselves in discovering our own Philosophy and how we should move on and stop treating ourselves as being carbon copies instead of trying to be unique individuals who think in a more open-minded way.We, as Filipinos, are conscious of our self-identity. We blame our colonizers for hindering our chance to develop our own culture. We become hopeless and it all comes down that we might even hate ourselves for being born Filipinos. As the article say, we fail on realizing our uniqueness. Our various adaptations of cultures like the Spanish, Chinese, Malay, and many more, our ways in politics, which are Greco-Roman, our diverse religions, are very much a great thought for us to ponder.

And we will learn somehow and someday that we really are somewhat something else.The article is a great read and the two last parts were for me the best ones. It gave a hint of hope and of realization that we need not cry over spilt milk. What has happened has happened, is what the article is telling. And in addition, the author diverts our thinking to make our thoughts of ourselves into something much more unique. The article is never bias and stays safe. Both informative and historical, the article gave more ideas for us to ponder and of course, to philosophize.

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