Faith in God can mean believing in God subjectively or believing in God objectively. Those who believe in God subjectively think that passion plays an important factor in having faith in God. Those who believe in God objectively think that reason plays an important factor in having faith in God. Both stances in having faith in God have problems. Can faith coming from passion be irrational? Can one be an honest religious thinker and still have genuine faith? This paper will give light to those questions by analyzing the notion of faith of these two great thinkers, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although both great thinkers brought great illumination to the relationship between faith and reason, the paper ends in challenging Kierkegaard’s thinking that faith can be irrational at times, like what happened in his discussion of the story of Abraham in his work entitled “Fear and Trembling.” The paper also challenges Wittgenstein’s thinking that one should approach the reality of faith by using reason only with his ideal of the honest religious thinker, written in his work posthumously published under the title “Culture and Value,” by using Kierkegaard’s discussion of the passion of the infinite.

This paper explores the value of benevolence as a cardinal virtue by analyzing the evolving history of virtue ethics from ancient Greek tradition to emotivism and contemporary thoughts. First, I would like to start with a brief idea of virtue ethics. Greek virtue theorists recognize four qualities of moral character, namely, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Christianity recognizes unconditional love as the essence of its theology. Here I will analyze the transition within the doctrine of virtue ethics in the Christian era and afterward since the eighteenth-century thinkers are immensely inspired by this Christian notion of love consider universal benevolence as the cardinal virtue. Later, Hume introduces an emotivist turn by considering the moral worth of sympathetic emotions in his ethical doctrine. In this paper, I aim to discover the cardinality of the virtue of benevolence following the evolutionary history of virtue ethics.

I aim to articulate and develop a consolidated model of Axel Honneth’s Recognition Theory. This paper aims at investigating the relationship of asymmetries of identities and social struggles as a progressive process of recognition in Honneth’s works. My paper is divided into three parts. The first part provides a consolidated outlook on Honneth’s Recognition Theory from the Struggle for Recognition to his more recent work Freedom’s Right. The second part covers the relationship between social struggles, social solidarity, and their effects on regenerating the necessary normative resources for individual selfactualization. The last part is my take on Honneth’s Recognition Theory in the form of understanding social pathologies in the context of investigating deficits of normative resources for self-actualization.

I re-question the Enlightenment by bringing together Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason. The year 2021 celebrates the 240th and 40th anniversary of the respective Critiques, and it is opportune to read the common thread that binds them—the Enlightenment. This essay has three parts: I first read the Critique of Pure Reason in light of Kant’s Enlightenment essay to underscore reason’s ill-fate as found in the public sphere; I then introduce Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason along with his general philosophy, highlighting the cynical state he characterizes reason’s public presence with. In the conclusion, I draw affinities between the two Critiques to form a certain dialogue in the presentation of both philosophers to understand the concept on stage: the Enlightenment.

Music is a cultural Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser 1971, 143- 148). In such a lens, this paper proceeds in the manner of Althusser’s argument, and the critique applies to popular music in the Philippines vis-à-vis Gramsci’s cultural hegemony. With such a framework, this paper looks into the albums of Musikang Bayan (People’s Music) from 2001 to 2019 and employs qualitative content analysis. In doing so, the themes are dealt with vis-à-vis the Philippine socio-politico-economic condition. The country’s socio-cultural atmosphere in the mainstream music industry is “not so” critical since social institutions are part of the relations of class domination (Althusser 2014, xxiv). Only if music is oriented with the people’s struggle will it become scientific and carry forward emancipatory politics transforming society. Musikang Bayan encapsulates the militant-materialist-progressive-nationalist music against the ‘fetish-character’ of today’s neoliberal capitalist ideology; hence, it articulates the collective consciousness through music.

This paper discusses the philosophical concept of John Rawls on distributive justice and how it can be applied as a possible guide in the Philippine ayuda distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, it discusses how the pandemic affected the Philippine economy and the complaints on the ayuda program regarding the ayuda distribution in the country. Second, it explains Rawlsian distributive justice and Rawls’ ideas, such as the veil of ignorance, liberty, and difference principles. Lastly, it discusses Rawls’ notion of distributive justice as a guide in the ayuda distribution to provide a perspective on the equitable and just distribution of benefits given the limited resources. The main point is that the distribution of financial assistance or ayuda can be guided by Rawls’s notion of distributive justice, which prioritizes the well-being of the least well-off or disadvantaged.