Filipino philosophy of education involves layers of meanings blurred by foreign assumptions. Any study that enlightens this theme is relevant and necessary. Hence, I intend to contribute to the aim of shedding light and exploring the richness of this discourse. Specifically, I focus on the historicity of Filipino philosophy, particularly under its colonial past. The literature suggests that education has been shaped by the colonizers, in particular, Christianity by the Spaniards and Pragmatism by the Americans. Albeit systematic, these philosophies of (...) education did less to alleviate national consciousness that could have developed into genuine economic progress, ethical mindfulness, and quality living for its people. I argue that this dissonance between theory and practice is entrenched in adherence to distant educational philosophies. This study proposes to address the issue by returning to Filipino indigenous teachings. Jeremiah Reyes (2015) identifies two Filipino virtues: loób and kapwa, which I attempt to appropriate in the contemporary pedagogy amidst the worldwide capitalist environment. This return to indigeneity further hopes to shape a critical yet optimistic trajectory of Filipino philosophy of education in the future. (shrink)

Metaphysics, seen as a legitimizing narrative or a paradigm (Lyotard, 1984), prop up a certain practice in providing the basis for its assumptions. While Western medicine can be properly characterized as governed by a biophysical model (Hewa, 1994; Bates, 2002), such a model for traditional healing practices in the Philippines has yet to be derived. No philosopher has attempted to derive an indigenous metaphysics from traditional healing practices. The only study made so far (Fajardo & Pansacola, 2013), however, needlessly pigeonholes (...) these unique practices into incommensurable Western scientific concepts. While they collated data from healers all over the country, they attempted to use Western scientific concepts such as oxygen, carbon, electro-magnetic force, and others. These concepts dangerously obfuscate indigenous understandings of the human body and reality as a whole since they are directly lifted from a language and practice informed by Western metaphysics. Therefore, there has yet to be an adequate extraction of a locally derived metaphysics that informs and self-legitimizes these medicinal practices. Conscious of recent critiques to homogenizing tendencies in Philippine Studies (Guillermo, 2009) and Filipino philosophy (Pada, 2014; Abulad, 2016), specifically that of Mercado (1972) and Timbreza (2017), I attempt to derive a Filipino metaphysics from the traditional healing practices of two traditional healers in San Mateo, Rizal of the Southern Tagalog Region in Luzon through a particularist anthropological approach in Filipino philosophy. I derive four distinct characteristics of this metaphysics which are distinct from the biophysical presuppositions of Western medicine: (1) a law of conservation based on the concept of “balik,” (2) predestination, (3) an ontological dualism between the visible and the invisible, and (4) the performativity of words as utterances. (shrink)

A number of paradigms have been proposed to understand the sources of meaningful work, but a non-Western approach has attracted little attention. This study aims to make a theoretical contribution toward an understanding of meaningful work from a virtue-ethics framework that is culturally meaningful and relevant to Filipino realities and their distinct cultural heritage. It develops a paradigm for a Filipino view of meaningful work that could guide both researchers and practitioners in business ethics by defining what is meaningful work, (...) explaining why it is important, and presenting some examples of concrete measures that management can utilize to promote meaningful work in the Philippine workplace. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Filipino concept of hiya, often translated as ‘shame’ or ‘embarrassment’, has often received ambivalent or negative interpretations. In this article I make an important distinction between two kinds of hiya: the hiya that is suffered as shame or embarrassment and the hiya that is an active and sacrificial self-control of one’s individual wants for the sake of other people. I borrow and reappropriate this distinction from Aquinas’ virtue ethics. This distinction not only leads to a more positive appraisal of (...) hiya, it also leads to a new understanding of associated concepts that are often confused with hiya such as amor propio, pakikisama and the infamous ‘crab mentality’. Defending hiya as a virtue is part of an even wider philosophical project, the move from ‘Filipino values’ to a ‘Filipino virtue ethics’, which I already introduced in a previous article in this journal. (shrink)

This article presents two approaches for computer simulations of virtue ethics in the context of agent-based modeling, a simple way and a complex way. The simple way represents virtues as numeric variables that are invoked in specific events or situations. This way can easily be implemented and included in social simulations. On the other hand, the complex way requires a PECS framework: physical, cognitive, emotional, and social components need to be implemented in agents. Virtue is the result of the interaction (...) of these internal components rather than a single variable. I argue that the complex way using the PECS framework is more suitable for simulating virtue ethics theory because it can capture the internal struggle and conflict sometimes involved in the practice of virtue. To show how the complex way could function, I present a sample computer simulation for the cardinal virtue of temperance, the virtue that moderates physical desires such as food, drink, and sex. This computer simulation is programmed in Python and builds upon the well-known Sugarscape simulation.1. (shrink)

Despite extensive theoretical debate, concrete efforts to overcome paternalism and unbalanced power relations between patients and doctors have produced limited results. In this article, I examine...