RE-THINKING FILIPINO PHILOSOPHY WITH GILLES DELEUZE

The question of Filipino philosophy has long been a staple of debates among Filipino students and scholars of philosophy due to its import to academic discourse as well as the weight it bears on the issue of Filipino identity. The tacit assumption is that the propounding of a distinctly Filipino worldview is necessary to identify what makes Filipinos Filipino. This assumption however is rendered problematic by two key related issues: first, the idea that philosophy can be defined along ethnic lines; and second, the unacknowledged metaphysical or essentialist claim that underwrites Filipinos' notion of identity. What I propose to do in this paper is to examine these two issues at length guided by the following questions: 1) What requires the re-thinking of Filipino philosophy?; 2) What are the concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze that can aid in such re-thinking? These questions shall be my points of departure in my attempt to critique of a mode of discourse labelled as Filipino philosophy and to explore new possibilities for the same with the aid of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). I believe that this discussion on Filipino philosophy through Gilles Deleuze has a significant role to play in understanding the separate yet interrelated evolution of the notions Filipino and philosophy in the midst of the global collapse of traditional political, economic and cultural borders.