Unfolding

Sometimes I hit myself with remorseful thoughts. I have reached the point and have asked myself: “Why should I continue on teaching?”. Let me tell you straight that I have no license to teach (not technically a professional and finishing quality graduate studies while working overload is very hard). I graduated from an arts course, and if you can also consider the context of a major in philosophy here in the Philippines. It came to me that I have made a wrong choice because it offered me nothing in this industrialized world. I could have been better off with any of the technical vocational popular courses which are in line with the demands of the market, yet I chose a course that brought me more ignorance once I studied it even more. More so, I landed on the very field I thought I can do best and that is teaching. Giving to you my background earlier, it goes to show I do not get paid well. Let me be honest to myself, I am not worth as much as those who have the necessary papers to pr...

“Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking. For we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do.” (M. Heidegger: What Calls For Thinking )                To think is a task and if it is a task, then it is not just a mere passing state but an act. Being conscious during the moment is different from thinking and many mistook a mere presence as the arduous intellectual task of thinking. Sadly, the prowess of intellectual activities has been equated and measured through stacking so many things in memory. To recall is different from thinking. But what is to think? Are we really thinking if we limit ourselves to the things we are inclined to? If we are inclined to some things are we just simply recalling? If we are inclined already to some things, are we really thinking or are we just following what i...

               Dictatorships troubled so many nations and ironically the immensity of its existence calls for the urgency of its removal. Dictatorship and its constant threat to rights imbues the conscious and practical oppressed to react and or rebel and as the saying goes ‘a cornered dog shows its teeth’. However, in the socio-political climate I lived in it is as seems that showing one’s teeth in dire struggle against the pincers of dictatorial rule is frowned upon. An interview with African female activists in Al Jazeera came into my head when she said that being an activist, a person who fights for an ideal and for the people is first hated by the very people whom she is trying to educate and to liberate. This is the typical allegory of the cave of Plato where liberation is seen as alien to the prisoners. The light is too bright for their petty eyes to relish. It is hard to saw or unshackle the chains of these people who will bite you for d...

(PS. I am sick. I am tired. Hopelessness dwell. The poet speaks) How much are our lives worth just to keep other’s joys worth? Since we did not choose to be born, they tell us death is not ours to make. Is it true liberation to be free from the shackles of fate? Fate not for us neither by our own hands, but from and for those upon our heads they stand. Life is supposed to be a gift, yet pain is constant and we cling to our grit. We were programmed to live, but on how to do it is worth of grief. They tell us to eat, to relax for tomorrow is another day upon the rack. They our captains, we their crew. I could have choke myself in the womb if I only knew. Yet, nurture, love, care are all but a virus. To support life as a disease. Malignant, contagious. Why is it that we yearn for a smile? We yearn for laugh? We are all going to die anyways. Why continue on breathing? Why can we not will this impulse to live? We are condemned to go on. Ironic. When we are abo...

INTRODUCTION      There are many versions of phenomenology that came after and surprisingly before Husserl mentioned it as his philosophy. Hegel used the term phenomenology in his Phenomenology of the Spirit yet we ponder was this the phenomenology that Husserl is stressing? Moreover, Husserls predecessors such as Kant also used the same term. Husserl embraced phenomenology and even baptized the term much later in his works for he was concerned first in creating arguments that are against the trend of psychologism during his time. Psychologism was a grand perversion of empiricism in a way that it has placed all into contingency without a way out. Most of Husserl’s early works are devoted into giving explanations against psychologism.  “His preoccupation with refuting ‘naturalism’ and ‘psychologism’ is the dominant theme in the first volume of  Logische Unterschungen . ” [1] Moreso, he wish to save the crisis that is looming especially that psychologism is ...