Jeremiah Joven Joaquin

In this paper, I address the problem about the role of academic philosophy for the feminist movement. I argue that the professionalization of feminism, especially within the sphere of academic philosophy, is detrimental to the stated goal of the feminist movement, which, as historically understood, is to procure women’s rights and liberties and to reassess the treatment of women by different social institutions. The thought is that if feminism were to reap the rewards of a socio-political change, feminists should stop their fantastic theorizing and start bringing their advocacies to the proper forums.

This article is a general introduction to the psychology of reasoning. Specifically, it focuses on the dual process theory of human cognition. Proponents of the said two-system view hold that human cognition involves two processes (viz., System 1 and System 2). System 1 is an automatic, intuitive thinking process where judgments and reasoning rely on fast thinking and ready-to-hand data. On the other hand, System 2 is a slow, logical cognitive process where our judgments and reasoning rely on reflective, careful analysis and data evaluation. Supposedly, these two cognitive processes are at play in every thinking task, and they sometimes work together and sometimes go against each other.

In elementary logic textbooks, Venn diagrams are used to analyze and evaluate the validity of syllogistic arguments. Although the method of Venn diagrams is shown to be a powerful analytical tool in these textbooks, it still has limitations. On the one hand, such method fails to represent singular statements of the form, “a is F.” On other hand, it also fails to represent identity statements of the form, “a is b.” Because of this, it also fails to give an account of the validity of some obviously valid arguments that contain these types of statements as constituents. In this paper, owing to the developments in the literature on Venn diagrams, we offer a way of supplementing the rules of the Venn diagram found in textbooks, and show how this retooled Venn diagram technique could account for the problem cases.

The debate concerning the proper way of understanding, and hence solving, the “is-ought problem” produced two mutually exclusive positions. One position claims that it is entirely impossible to deduce an imperative statement from a set of factual statements. The other position holds a contrary view to the effect that one can naturally derive an imperative statement from a set of factual statements under certain conditions. Although these two positions have opposing views concerning the problem, it should be evident that they both accept that the “is-ought problem” is concerned with the deducibility of imperative statements from factual statements. Later I will argue that this should not be our concern when we try to make sense of the way we reason about morality.

In this essay, I would like to look at two particular attempts of developing a preliminary question that paves the way for establishing a Filipino Philosophy: viz. Rolando Gripaldo’s Historian of Philosophy approach and Napoleon Mabaquiao’s Strict Discipline approach. The former envisages that the first question that needs to be considered in the discussion of Filipino Philosophy must be taken from the perspective of a scholar of the history of philosophy. The latter’s procedure is to take what academic philosophers deem to be the characterization of their discipline. In effect, while the former’s question is a question of a historian of philosophy; the latter’s question is a question of a philosopher. As this essay progresses I will try to make a critical assessment of the two attempts by first showing the strengths and weaknesses of their respective attempts, and secondly by stressing that their attempts, whether successful or not, should already be taken as contributions to the effort of establishing a Filipino Philosophy.