About the book:
Despite the beginnings of philosophical diversification, it can be said that the philosophical landscape of the 1960s was still dominated by Thomism, specifically its Iberian legacy, which has proven itself, for the most part, as the standard method of thinking—as the unconscious background by which all other streams of thought outside of it must be put to the test. On the other hand, it also became increasingly evident that there was an intermittent sprouting or blooming of other philosophical schools of thought—whether ancient philosophy, or continental philosophy—either as subsequent topics considered or an international development on the part of some pioneers, which apparently shows us the shockwave of modern philosophy to the world, affecting the site of philosophy in the country. We can thus see the efforts of some of our philosophical forebears to put on the map other philosophies which might have been overshadowed by the towering Medieval, Scholastic, and in particular, Thomistic tradition that was predominant in our country’s philosophical scholarship back then. These new waves of thought were not necessarily ‘new’ in the sense that they were new in the history of philosophy. Rather, they were new to Filipino philosophical scholarship, because the content of these philosophies (again, whether ancient or modern) began to gradually emerge in its full extent, no small thanks to the rigor of and commitment to philosophical scholarship brought about by those trained abroad. Eventually, these new thoughts were introduced to the country with such stringency of standard comparable to the established Thomistic tradition.
–Excerpt from the Introduction to Doing Philosophy in the Philippines, Volume 3