The literature has shown that the theory of mental models is able to describe human inductive processes. That theory has been related to the structure of inductive inferences, such as Gautama’s Syllogism indicates. On the other hand, the theory of mental models has also been linked to modal system K. This paper argues that there can be a connection between Gautama’s Syllogism and system K, not in rigorous logical deductions but in describing how the human mind can work. They can refer to two different moments of inductive reasoning; the rule of necessitation of K can be a key element in the second of those moments.

This paper provides a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s former teacher at École Normale Supérieure (ÉNS), then famous for fashioning Marxism with the philosophical gauge of structuralism, Louis Althusser (1918-1990). Perhaps a brief discussion on the relation between the two would render context to the origins of Rancière's philosophico-political praxis, specifically the humble beginnings of conceptualizing an egalitarian method out of his philosophical rupture with Althusserianism. Meanwhile, to reduce the philosophical enterprise of Althusser into its practical shortcomings and silence during the revolutionary events of May 1968 in France would do an injustice to the magnitude of his contribution to contemporary French political theory and his major revisions in the theoretical direction of the Parti communiste français (PCF). Thus, the following discussions focus on sketching Althusser's theoretical foundations, which possibly clarifies the political decision he has made during May '68: a demand for organization over spontaneous revolutionary activity based on the authority of theoretical practice over the ideological activities—a decision that became the point of departure for Rancière's subversion of both mastery and the structural inequality Althusserianism entail. The whole piece is guided by the following two-fold question—a question, perhaps, akin to Badiou's inquiry: What were the philosophico-political interventions of Louis Althusser, and why did Rancière move away from his direction?

This paper argues that the educators' vocation, in the Arendtian sense, is to prepare and cultivate in students the love for the world – amor mundi. Educators are responsible for introducing the world to students through the conservation and preservation of human tradition and the 'realm of the past.' Thus, it requires a practice of truth-telling or parrhesia. However, this parrhesiastic activity is not explicit in Arendt. This paper also invokes Foucault's account of parrhesia to emphasize another main point of this paper, i.e., Arendt's conservationist view of education implies or presupposes the practice of truth-telling. If such an idea is correct, the positioning of education becomes ambiguous. For Arendt, education is located 'in between' the realms of the pre-political and political. However, suppose this implicitness of truth-telling is proven to be correct and affirmed. In such a case, we can say that education and its main motor – educators as intellectuals/scholars have a quasi-political role in society.

If we are to periodize the intellectual biography of Rolando Gripaldo into his Mindanaoan, Lasallian, and retirement periods, his Lasallian period would be a very significant one because this is the period where he produced the most important works that earned him a niche as one of the important Filipino philosophers. This paper exposed and analyzed the works of Gripaldo in this very significant period of his intellectual biography. This paper was able to identify four clusters of themes that recur in Gripaldo’s Lasallian period writings: 1) his reflective thoughts on Filipino philosophy, 2) his studies of Filipino philosophical luminaries, 3) his critical Filipino philosophy, and 3) his efforts towards revisionist writing. This paper contributes towards the discourse of Filipino philosophy that studies Filipino philosophical luminaries, a discourse in which Gripaldo was a leading advocate. Contributions in this specific discourse can make Filipino philosophy more mainstream and easier to study, especially for beginners and undergraduate students.

In Words and Battlefields: A Theoria on the Poem, Cirilo Bautista advances the thesis that there is such a thing as a Filipino epic and that it is key to nation-building.1 Well known for his long-form poetry, Bautista can be said to be taking a position on one of the main issues in the philosophy of poetry, namely the ontology or being of poems. I argue that his theory of the poem has three cornerstones, which I critique and evaluate through a close reading of the epic poem “The Cave.”

Christian apologetics has recently gained a new impetus from authors such as Alister McGrath, who advocates a new, Trinitarian approach to natural theology, the main purpose of which is to confirm a resonance between scientific discoveries and Christian doctrine, thus confirming its credibility. In this article, we use Trinitarian natural theology, which has many advantages over classical natural theology, on the example of the surprising phenomenon of true love. This is manifested in the material world in The Principle of Insufficient Reason, observable through observations of deeds of love, which lack reciprocity and, in the lifeworld in the essence of ratio-sui or selfexplicability of true love, experienceable through experiences of explanation of the reasons for love with love itself. The analysis of different layers of reality and its scientific methods, together with the postpositivistic recognition of the plurality of methods, has shown that the method of inference to the best explanation, which is used in the article, is a legitimate scientific method. The Christian doctrine of the Triune God of Love and the doctrine of perichoresis make perfect sense of the empirical observations and lifeworld experiences of true love. However, the question remains unanswered: which of the worldviews best explains the curious and surprising phenomenon of true love?

The objective of this work is to investigate the philosophical anthropology that underpins the anthropology of the Early Christians. It is curious to know why Christian anthropology is intellectually and practically inclined towards the philosophical anthropology of the Platonic tradition rather than the theological-philosophical tradition of the biblical Hebrew people in the Old Testament. Today the emphasis on Christian anthropology is that the human person is an integration of body and soul. Contrary to this position, the writer maintains that the Christian anthropology, especially during the period of the early Christians (here understood as the period within the first five centuries C.E.), fundamentally conceives the human person as a composite of soul and body, which is a conscious employment of Platonic anthropology. This article observes that, as regards the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, there is a dichotomy between theological coherency and the actual Christian practice on the Christian conception of the human person. Hence, this work argues that the Platonic influence on the philosophical anthropology of the Early Christian was a deliberate act to give a more rational foundation to the theological problematic on the resurrection of the dead and on the resurrected body. It explains why Aquinas’s theological cum philosophical thinking, though overwhelmingly an Aristotelian ground, could not “Aristotelize” his philosophical anthropology.

Contemporary philosophy of mind is generally characterized by its project to naturalize the mind. Utilizing the findings of the different sciences involved in cognitive science, especially those of artificial intelligence and neuroscience, it continues to explore ways to explain the workings of the mind in purely scientific terms. But despite the rigor and sophistication of its methods, certain questions critical to its success have remained unanswered, such as how consciousness emerges from the brain’s physical processes and how the phenomenal properties of our conscious experiences arise from the physical properties of our bodily experiences. This has led some scholars to seek alternative perspectives. One such perspective that is widely explored today is Buddhist thought. The centrality of the mind in Buddhist thought and its perceived compatibility with the findings of modern science make it an attractive alternative framework to carry out the naturalization project. In this paper, I aim to examine the plausibility of this strategy. In particular, I shall evaluate whether Buddhist thought provides the needed insights to overcome the challenges facing the said project.

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.

Immanuel Kant has indeed initiated a new era in philosophy with his new ideas on epistemology and ethics with his works Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. However, prior to these works, Kant underwent certain development in his philosophical thinking— initially as a rationalist, then eventually maturing to the philosopher that he is known for. In line with this development of Kant’s philosophical thought, the researcher’s particular interest is in his ideas on God and metaphysics. By reviewing Kant’s philosophical works especially in the Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens [1755], A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition [1755], and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God [1763], we find out that his initial idea of God reflects his rationalist convictions as thought by his mentors from the Leibniz- Wolffian school. However, his critical project that attempted to put metaphysics on solid ground resulted in more doubt of its certainty. This affected especially his ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, which he believes can no longer be supported with the transcendent metaphysics he used to adhere to. This led Kant to concede that in the realm of pure reason, the idea of God cannot be satisfactorily justified. He eventually found a new ground where the idea of God can stand in his investigations on practical reason and morality.

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.

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.