The Philosophical landscape : a panoramic perspective of philosophy / edited by Rolando M. Gripaldo.

Philosophy in the Philippines has not been given the importance it deserves the way it has been relatively given in France and Germany, or even in England and the United States. We feel it is high time that, as a marginalized sector of the Philippine academe, Filipino philosophy teachers and philosophers should start writing about various areas in philosophy to seek a wider audience. Part of the explanation for the misunderstanding of philosophy as a discipline is that it has never been given a proper treatment. Seminaries, for example, and many sectarian colleges and universities generally limit themselves to continental philosophy and are less literate in the analytic philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the University of the Philippines limits itself basically to the analytic tradition with very minimal exposure to the continental tradition. The discipline of philosophy, of course, includes not only Western philosophy but also Eastern or Asian philosophy. As far as I know as of this moment, there is no department of philosophy in the Philippines that caters to philosophy as a discipline except for the De La Salle University Philosophy Department. So far, I can see ideological lines based on philosophical traditions, where each tradition does not consider the other tradition as philosophical. Only the historian of philosophy has the gift to transcend the quarrels and idiosyncracies of all philosophical traditions, and put them all in one basket called "philosophy." In this way, historians of philosophy view their ideological quarrels as parochial and does not consider those quarrels as diminishing or disparaging the stature and reputation of philosophy as a discipline.