WHENEVER I am asked about Filipino philosophy, I immediately ask what the term "Filipino philosophy" could possibly refer to. Philosophers are not even in complete agreement as to what philosophy should be busy with. Most philosophy students take pre-Socratic thought — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, the Pythagoreans, etc. — to mark the beginning of the philosophical enterprise and, for most of them, the inquiry — which they neither called "philosophy" nor were they aware of as philosophical — centers on the "urstoff," the one into which the many may be resolved, the elemental constituent of all things. Much the same thing can be said of the Upanishads, for with the enunciation of the primordial principle that "Atman is Brahman," they were, in fact, concerned with the One as against the Many of everyday experience.
A.J. Ayer is representative of the analytic tradition. For him, philosophy was not a competitor of science. Unlike science, philosophy has no distinct method for obtaining and producing data. That task it leaves to science. What philosophy is concerned with, Ayer thinks — and others with him — is talking about the data, describing the data and characterizing the data. So when the paleontologist and the anthropologist have unearthed various remains exhibiting fundamental characteristics but also marking stages in evolution, the question about when one should talk of the appearance of the "human species" ceases to be a scientific question. It is an issue about how one describes and characterizes the data. I once asked an archaeologist friend the basis of their discipline's classification of fossil remains as "human," and he told me that they looked at cranial indicators of the ability to speak. Quite clearly, that is a criterion owed not to science but to philosophy that describes the human and characterizes it as "ens linguisticus," "homo loquens."
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