Chloe Nicole Piamonte

This paper stresses the place of a phenomenology of place in philosophical discussions on the constituents of what various philosophers designate as the good life. A phenomenological approach to place aids in addressing the taken-for-grantedness of our lifeworld and its implications—including but not limited to—questions on embodiment, freedom, and intersubjectivity. Phenomenology reveals the layers of meaning behind the varying dimensions of human experience that constitute our lived emplacement. In turn, a phenomenology of place examines the onset of a conscious and subjective interpretation of places, as well as the things and concepts surrounding them. Making sense of the importance of place and locality is integral to the meaning-making endeavor that humans bear on their shoulders, even when the inevitable transformation of the world at particular moments in time leads to placelessness. Since phenomenology unfolds the richness of our everyday life, this philosophical reflection contends that placing ourselves is crucial to construing a life well-lived that makes human flourishing possible.

This paper explores the phenomenon of being ill (in cases of serious, chronic and terminal illnesses) both in its subjective and intersubjective dimensions. My main contention is that the philosophical tools of phenomenology uncover the framework for understanding the lived experience of the ill person as they privilege the first-person account of illness. It is through this that the essence of things and phenomena surrounding the body-in-illness are unveiled, as opposed to the medical world’s perspective, a third-person account of diseases. A phenomenology of illness underscores that illness is a substantial parcel of human existence that alters the ill person’s experience of the body, intersubjective relations with the other, and relation with the world entirely. This essay is constituted of four major sections dabbling with a phenomenological account of the experience of the lived body, the body-in-illness, the intersubjective dimension of the body-in-illness, and a note on health.

The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of an academic community on the development of the self, as the latter engages itself with the former in terms of social experiences, interactions, and role-taking. For a social thinker such as George Herbert Mead, one is not born with a self but develops such when subscribing to role-taking. Herein, roles are referred to as a conglomeration of various behaviors that respond to different or some other sets of behaviors of others in its environment. Tthe paper argues that the educational environment—the school, the academic institution as such—drives one to play the role of being a slave; a happy slave to be more exact, through inculcating upon one’s mind the assumed glory of being a well-paid worker who feeds the demands of the society. Education here is sought most likely as a dumb show that rather teaches and trains the young to willingly play the role of a societal slave and project him/her towards such where one becomes contented and ‘happy’ before he/she even becomes aware of it.

One of the most widely acknowledged Filipino cultural values is utang na loob. Sometimes translated as “debt of gratitude,” it refers to an informal form of reciprocal social obligation that arises when a person is significantly assisted by another during a difficult time. As it touches on the Filipino sense of human dignity and social responsibility, utang na loob is one critical theme in most research investigating the characteristics of the Filipino psyche, culture, and social behavior. Explaining the nature and occurrence of utang na loob, however, has its challenges, foremost of which is how to appropriately account for its negative or morally problematic instantiations. This essay examines how some approaches that regard utang na loob as a moral virtue handle this challenge. After identifying several difficulties with these approaches, the essay argues for an alternative approach that maintains the status of utang na loob as a cultural value whose instantiating actions are subject to moral evaluation.