The term inday implies two possible meanings depending on where one is in the Philippines. In the Luzon group of islands, more specifically in Metro Manila, inday refers to the female help, usually of Visayan descent. On the other hand, in the Visayas and Mindanao group of islands, inday is a term used for endearment and respect for female family members, friends, and women of influence. What this paper aims to do is to provide a theoretical grounding, through oppositional gazing, (...) of why the term inday oscillates between varied definitions in the context of placism or discrimination of people based on where they (used to) live or where they come from, and displacement or the movement of something (in this case, someone) from one’s place. Furthermore, it shows the role that the term inday plays in the complex web of oppressive realities given the actuality of inday’s membership in marginalized groups. Finally, it explores ways of how one can recover the endearment for inday despite placist culture. (shrink)

On the one hand, people have witnessed a lot of amazing technological inventions and innovations in the multifaceted performances of artificial intelligence systems ever since the earliest stages of their development. Activities previously done with a lot of manual and muscular efforts are now accomplished with no sweat and just at the tip of one’s finger. I would venture to say that artificial intelligence is among the highest scientific and technological achievements of humanity in the post-modern civilization. Yet on the (...) other hand, are we worried that humanity will soon be threatened by the dark side of AI systems when the truth of the matter is long before the advent of AI, humanity has always been threatened by the evil forces of totalitarian powers well-entrenched in governments and big capitalist empires in control of nations’ economies? Future AI systems employed and mobilized in the service of these political and economic powers will certainly heighten the degree of their oppressive domination and intensify the common people’s oppression. (shrink)

Philosophizing is at risk in the face of dogmatism, either political or religious. In political and/or religious circumstances where freedom of expression is curtailed, the risk of critical and discursive philosophizing (pursued both analytically and synthetically) is extremely far above the ground. As a case in point, getting into a balanced critical and appreciative philosophical deliberation (reflection and discourse) on the Israeli-Palestinian political conflicts and controversies right inside Israel with politically fired-up Israelis both intellectual and non-intellectual alike is a risky (...) engagement. What is specifically tolerable in such a particular context is ¨imbalanced philosophizing¨ (which is an oxymoron) wherein one is only allowed to DISCURSIVELY APPRECIATE the merits of just one side of the political divide over the other and never to be critical of the downsides discovered on the same side. Of course, the other philosophical operation of REFLECTIVE CRITICISM doesn´t get apparent, much less obvious, in such condition as it is forbidden to see the light of day. The risk lies in an open defiance of the restriction and could even be a matter of life and death. Similar to this was the situation in the erstwhile Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites during the so-called Cold War era. Discursive criticism even within the strict purview of philosophical analysis and synthesis of certain political principles and theories operative within the system was a proscribed exercise whose violation could put involved individuals in a gulag, a mental asylum or at worst before a firing squad. (shrink)

In both paradigm-shaping novels, the central issue is the human person: Is s/he an autonomous being, that is a “being-for-itself” (with apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre) endowed with free-will and the inherent power to organize and hence determine her/his future? Or, is s/he solely a physico-mechanical “object” whose ideas, thoughts, feelings and decisions are just by-products of her/his physico-chemical constitution, genetic configuration and environmental conditioning? From where does s/he draw the meaningfulness of her/his life? Or perhaps the more fundamental question is: (...) Is her/his life meaningful at all? Is humanity’s future predetermined by material limitations in a closed system of reality or it depends on one’s choices and decisions in a reality that is open to the unhindered operation of her/his free will? Or, given that there is human free will, could the problem lie in the condition that the majority of human beings conduct their lives like sheep in a flock whose course is stirred, regulated and determined by the strong, the tough and the powerful minority among them? Are manipulation and control an inherent dynamic to make society orderly and organized, well-coordinated, well-managed and properly governed? (shrink)

Looking at philosophy—and I mean western philosophy to be more specific—in the course of its historical development that goes back to ancient Greece, it emerged as a thematic phenomenon in the spontaneous course of broadening the scope of the sphere of human intellectual achievements at the time when the ancient Greeks were deeply immersed in and dimly shrouded by the superstitions and mystifications that characterized its mythological religion dominated by the Olympus-based pantheon of gods and goddesses led by the ¨almighty¨ (...) Zeus. If we want now to talk of fiction, ancient mythological Greek religion was hardcore fiction. And the emergence of the first so-called philosophers was a welcome relief in the lives of a people fed up with the exploitative machination of a hyper-superstitious religion enslaving them for so many generations. (shrink)

In situations of information overload, where cases of garbage-in-garbage-out are commonplace, it is necessary to sort out important and appropriate data for one’s specific purposes. A deluge of seemingly interrelated or interconnected data may lead us from one analytic moment to another without consideration for the credibility of our sources. Since people generally tend to be on one side of an issue rather than the other, information exploration and gathering can become a quantitative rather than qualitative exercise, as we are (...) commonly inclined to feed and reinforce our opinion and argument with one-sided information, to the neglect of necessary and vital points in the opposite argument. Unilateral information, which could at worst come from spurious and unreliable sources, appropriated to beef up a stand on a certain issue, can never lead to a meaningful understanding of reality. (shrink)

The gap between teaching and learning occurs likewise and exclusively in the human condition, though—as we have pointed out earlier—not in all instances because human sensitivity to the fundamental character of the nature-to-culture trajectory will prevent the chasm. To be more specific on this issue, it is in the formalization of the teaching-learning event in the hands of human initiators that the gap gets in as a resultant disorder—even a syndrome. In this sense, formalized teaching doesn´t always result to learning. (...) In certain cases, formalized teaching (as in a school classroom) simply gets so far as the level of a mental assent—a theoretical approximation of a subject matter whose empirico-pragmatic location in real life is nowhere found. Learning—if we could call it as such—in this case is hence short of realization. (shrink)

The world has been shrinking as new communication technologies and facilities are being developed. Globalization has become more real now than in its early stages of advancement. The issue of better understanding and communication through symbolic representations has likewise become more imminent in the present dispensation while setting aside the endeavour to come up with and develop a single international tongue. In the face of problems brought about by the impossibility of direct communication and understanding among people of different nations (...) in a “babel” of diverse languages is a serious international “debabelization” endeavour through the formulation of internationally standardized pictograms easily recognizable and comprehensible by “globalized” denizens of different societies and nations on planet Earth. (shrink)

On this particular issue about ¨truth¨, I´d rather focus more on the specific problematization of ¨sentential truth¨. In other words, I will not be concerned with the truth of an event or an experience per se in the objective, intersubjective or subjective sense. In the present consideration, I´d be more concentrated on the truth of beliefs uttered in meaningful statements. This distinctively philosophical approach—in the linguistic-analytic tradition—is supportive of the intent to determine whether certain beliefs are matters of knowledge or (...) not with respect to how classical philosophy presupposes that ONLY true beliefs achieve the category of knowledge. In this sense, the question of being true or the problem of truth plays an intrinsic function in the technical aspect of philosophy mainly in the discipline of epistemology (the philosophical field that deals with the issue of knowledge). In the most fundamental formulation, knowledge is defined as true belief. To resolve whether a belief is true or not, it has to be initially articulated in a sensible statement and must finally pass the test of verification. (shrink)

Art is the concrete/tangible/substantial materialization of the human creative impulse to convey her/his most vital desires and needs. Art is the channel that facilitates the release of humanity´s imaginative urge that makes life more liveable and more worth enhancing. In a broader sense, we may even contend that human life in its truest essence is art itself. It is the artistic spirit of humanity that sees beauty in the natural environ of earthly existence. The course of life on earth provides (...) magnificent inspiration to the creative human being in the furtherance of the world which s/he started to create millennia ago and has been the focal point of her/his most determined struggles to survive, to improve and to make life more meaningful despite myriads of troubles, adversities and tragedies. (shrink)