GAWAING-PILOSOPO

Philosophy in the Philippines

Ranhilio Aquino on Philosophy in the Philippines and the Task of Philosophers

The eclipse of philosophy in the university curriculum

In a few weeks, that which many students dread will happen-the opening of the new school year. Despite spiraling costs of tertiary education, many will flock to our universities and colleges with differing degrees of enthusiasm and aptitude and, so the common thinking goes, after four years or so, they will be qualified for employment. Courses used to be simple and the choices few. They are now as many and as diverse as the imaginativeness of curriculum planners.  Click here to read the full essay.

What philosophers do

COMIUCAP is the acronym for “Conference Mondiale des Institutions Universitaires Catholiques de Philosophie”-The World Conference of Catholic University Institutions of Philosophy. It is meeting in Manila on Sept. 11 to 13. It is certainly a global event for philosophers, philosophy professors, students and dabblers. Not much is heard about it because, in the Philippines, those who bother about philosophy in more than a casual manner may very well qualify to be on the “endangered list.”  Click here to read the full essay.

August 26, 2008 - Posted by gawaingpilosopo | Journals, Digests, & Essays, Provocations | | 1 Comment

1 Comment »

  1. WHAT IT MEANS TO PHILOSOPHIZE

    “Education doesn’t make you happy, and nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free, if we are, or because we’ve been educated, if we have, but because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears…tells us where delights are lurking…convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever—that of the mind—and gives us the assurance, the confidence, to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.”
    Iris Murdoch
    (philosopher, novelist)

    The mind is the true birthplace of philosophy. Sparked to life by wonder, nurtured by difference, philosophy weaves through the fissures and cracks of history, the space in which what is meaningful is worked out.

    But what does it mean to philosophize? Beyond rumination to poetize reality, it means to ever love wisdom. Akin to Sisyphean task and Quixotic quest, the philosopher assumes the hero’s deed—“he braves to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience”.

    To philosophize is to equip our mind with a better habit of thought, to further our investigative search. Armed with the scalpel of reason, the thinker assists the unveiling of the concealed and cuts through canonized constructs until they become living tissues again. Away from the magma of stupidity, he lives in a less-pretentious world, perhaps not aiming for lucidity, but obscurity that allows room for play. And exposed to conflicting interpretations, he celebrates plurality of perspectives, inspiring richer change.

    Out into the open, the homo viator travels. But unlike Odysseus leaving Ithaca only to return thereafter, he sets forth like Abraham leaving his homeplace into the promised unknown. Such is the thrust in the achievement of the moment, leaping into the absurd and finding his personal assent of faith. Unbeholden to bigotry, the philosopher seeks not to trivialize but to dramatize the plight of the marginalized, allowing them to speak and affording them dignified space within the bounds of the whole history of reason.

    To ensure its survival and subsistence, philosophy ought to untie the Gordian knot of unconditional attachment to univocity and unrehabilitated tradition, to shatter the idolized obelisk and omphalos of totalizing grand narratives, and to do away with the golden calf of absolute frameworks. How then do we speak and think? We speak and think when we let go of allegiances, entrusting ourselves to the epochality of truth and the language of difference, thus generating meaning without the manacles of the absolute and final authority. Engendering multiplicity, openness to other perspectives and dialogue, our mind then is prudent to vindicate claims, capitalize commitment, and make informed decisions.

    The philosopher’s mind is nomadic. It cannot be arrested and stayed. It creates and explores newer horizons. Yet its nature as a lover only remains true and lasting as long as it searches for beloved wisdom.

    Different

    Not to say what everyone else is saying
    not to believe what everyone else believed
    not to do what everybody did,
    then to refute what everyone else was saying
    then to disprove what everyone else believed
    then to deprecate what everybody did,

    was his way to come by understanding

    how everyone else was saying the same as he was saying
    believing what he believed
    and did what doing.

    Clere Parsons
    (1908 – 1931)

    Comment by TheDarkhorse | December 4, 2008 | Reply


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