AT THE STOA

His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes deserves all those honorifics. And if I am allowed to state one reason and one reason alone for that, for there are many, I will say this: he knows the value of a shield, in whatever form. One of the forms a shield can take is a nightwatchman's badge.  A badge isn't just something you just flip at people's faces to tell them who you are. The reason why a badge takes the form of a shield is that, according to Vimes, it shields the nightwatchman from himself. Because a nightwatchman is vested with the order of the law, and the painful authority of a nightstick, and the terrifying power of being allowed to do things and say how things should go, what identifies him as a nightwatchman should be a promise not to take all that power and wreak destruction to the world because of it. That is how a nightwatchman loves the law. And that is how love is. For their intensity, most loves are like waterfalls, or w...

I have a few friends who are Math majors, so I apologize for this in advance. Said people, please don't bother to correct me, I know I'm wrong. I'd make for a very poor Philosophy major if I didn't. The purity of mathematics is incomparable to any other: it alone can boast of an objectivity that is almost not scientific, if by "science" we think of empiricality. Concepts and axioms in (pure) mathematics have no need of empirical epistemology, they are abstract, or, more correctly, math is the realm of the abstract, in the most abstract sense of the word, even. This is because math does not belong to time and space. It can measure and model time and space, yes, but it has to stand outside of them for it to have the capacity to do that. That is why, in Sir Terry Pratchett's Nation , we see two strangers who do not speak the same language have difficulty in learning terms for numbers, since things always have inherent quantity (what Locke would call ...

To this day, I have heard almost 200 audio hours of interviews. To this day, I have seen hundreds of thousands of people, in images, over the internet (considering that we see, and I say this supposedly as a conservative estimate , 200 ads a day). In two of my earliest adult memories of being so floored by what I am looking at, I remember looking at a woman who was texting on her cellphone, standing by a hospital, with moles on her face that served only to accentuate her features. I remember looking at a child with three moles on her cheek, in a straight line going from below her eye to her jawline, and how she sat so still in the jeepney, clutching her oversized, violet bag. I remember seeing, for ten seconds, a man walk by the window of the cafe I was then sitting at, whose appearance so struck me that I have written several paragraphs about him, the entirety of which  doesn't  exist. More recently, since I just hear voices through my work, I have heard a nurse bein...

The movie's theme is simple, (in the shallow sense of simple ): time.  But time is not simple, again, in the shallow sense of the word. You know, of course, that the time we're talking about is not in any substantial way related to the  timepiece . (Although that is one impressive hell of a timepiece.) Each of the main characters in the movie (and I will stick to the movie, since I have read approximately no percent of the comics) can be understood vis-à-vis a, or their, philosophy of time. As such, perhaps the simplest  (oh, man, I'm throwing that word around a lot without using its colloquial meaning) way to start is with the character of Baron Mordo. In the movie, he serves as one of Dr. Strange's masters in his training both his physical and psychic prowess. We see a man who, fortuitously (or is it?) very much resembles the character of The Operative in Serenity , in terms of the consequentialist view with which both (or is it?) see duty. Mordo, understanding...

I don't know how to do this without spoilers, philosophical persnicketiness, or proper review elements whatsoever, so I'll just bulldoze my way through it. I've been reading manga the past few evenings. I started with Iya da Nante Iwasenai , an average work about a relationship between two childhood friends whose love is constantly challenged by an age difference. Magnet na Watashitachi  was a bit better, if only because the female protagonist wasn't as annoying, and the male protagonist is severely dysfunctional (though without the comedy of the one in Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun .) It's your formulaic outcast-helped-by-a-compassionate-person story, with lolicon subtexts that aren't disruptive, and the female character is okay.  Kiken Mania 's female, by contrast, is... Wait, by far , the most annoying of all the female protagonists in both manga and anime that I can recall off the top of my head, perhaps because it's made explicit time and again that she...

I walked around with and noticed that I drank at with And I waited for while looking at And I was happy that I was alone

It's raining again. I just came home after spending the morning running errands. The transactions at the banks I went to went faster than was possible, given that I usually spend half an hour minimum waiting for my pending number to be called. Today, however, by the time my pending ticket came out of the dispenser, I was served before I can even sit down. This might be because the usual clerk manning one counter wasn't there, the one who might as well serve customers once every five hours for all the dallying he does. His sweater, last time I saw him, said "Word." I will let his choice of wardrobe represent all the adjectives lining up in my mouth. After the refreshing absence of that clerk, I went to a restaurant where three grown men were sitting one table away from mine, talking about religion. Their conversation was suffused with the enthusiasm normally seen among men talking about their fighting cocks or the sorry state of the country and what should be done....

Since yesterday I have been watching Kara no Kyoukai after working. It's a sombre fantasy anime, set in a world where there seems to be no run-of-the-mill deaths whatsoever, as everyone who dies ends up with parts either strewn all over the place or bent in places they weren't supposed to go. The art and music is good, and you can see that the creator (Kinoku Nasu) wanted to make its content philosophical, with lines like, There are two ways to escape. Escape without purpose, and escape with a purpose. The former is called floating, and the latter, flight. You're the one who decides which one your overlooking view was. But it's a mistake to choose your path based on the sins you carry. We don't choose our path depending on the sins we carry, but instead must carry our sins on the path we choose. You can see why I would be drawn to it, as it, like most Japanese works in which I can identify philosophical themes, harbor an unshakeable metaphysics involving a so...

I came across Ed Gaesler a few months ago speaking about how work provides one of the last true opportunities for our socialization as a species, since educational institutions and churches in the contemporary period seem to highlight the agenda-heavy politics of these social structures themselves, and the enculturation and socialization which should have been inherent but emphatic in them comes a far second. In an unrelated note, the picture above is the view from my room. As is this one. It usually gets foggy in the afternoons, since I am staying in a city 5,000 feet above sea level, nestled in a gigantic mountain range spanning 7,000 square miles.  I usually work in my room, with this view, and with beer. (And with that specific beer can above, it's been two months and I haven't finished it yet). Because my work does not require me to mingle with people (which is why I chose it as my work now as opposed to the dozen years I spent intermingling with people who...

"I am too weak to take my own life, but I am too strong to be granted madness." I have no idea where that line came from now, if it's my head or a bastardization of something I read (in all likelihood it is the second that is true. As with most things, I don't know if this is in my head or not). This line, of being just aware of how weak you are in the chaos of everything your mind or environment puts you through, while at the same time of how marginally strong you are because you are still marginally able to function, might be descriptive of what besets people with anxiety, or with a hyperawareness of life itself, or those who are unceasingly conscious of how they are alive. (Paradoxically, in being hyperaware of how one is, one forgets that one is, but that's another creature altogether.) For is it not weakness that prevents you from ending it all finally? And / But is it also not strength that you can still even think of how chaotic life is, meaning that yo...

I am not certain where to start, since I have always already started, and as Derrida would have it, "We are always beginning, wherever we are." The profundity in that statement is equal to its tautologicality, which is further equaled only by its full-willed and open-eyed resignation to whatever and wherever you are. As Pratchett would have it, "We are here, and this is now." Or if you want, the Romans have simplified it to what is an adverb, but is really an injuction: hic et nunc .  Here and now. Always already a here and now, whatever it contains. Throwing in two very simple but elegant (those two are also equal, not deserving the but ) phrases out of two massive thinkers is not a good way to begin, but what is a good way to begin? We can never get proper traction in asking ourselves that question, for we are always already here, if only so that question can be asked. The question - and all questions - come a split second after the fact of our being facts. An...

This post has been a long time coming, so long a time it went back to even before I had this blog, or indeed, even before there was high-speed internet. Because this post will be about why I got drawn to philosophy when I was in first year college (in 1999). And I also suspect that this post is about love. I also suspect that the way I love is the way I deal with philosophy, which is by implication the way philosophy (if it were a mistress) deals with me, all of which contribute to the fact that I'm single. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I also suspect that I will always do that, like what I did six words ago. To begin. I didn't choose philosophy as my major when I signed up for university. Like most high school students, I had no idea what I would like to grow up as: the practical  question of what I wanted to spend my entire life building a career around isn't real, or isn't as real as... Hmm, give me a moment to say what is categorically real during high ...

It is approximately 3:00 AM when your brain starts to huddle by itself within the vast empty hall of your skull, having reached the long, dark, teatime of man. The feeling is not unlike wanting to get a blanket if only to make the world stop worlding. No matter the events the previous day, and the inevitable alienated labor within the next few hours, come 3:00 you will have any or all of these thoughts running, directionless, in your head: 1. Had you known you'd end up awake until 3:00 AM, you should've gotten that piece done instead of wasting your life on the internet for seven hours and now it's too late to get it done so you'll just have a glass of a two-star-reviewed wine, or maybe thirty-five, damn the hangover and resulting similar unproductivity later. 2. The face of a random stranger you met on the street, and how she looks like standing against the wall of that particular hospital, looking down at her phone, with her beautiful face and all its moles; or th...

It's ultimately funny how I ended up reading  No Longer Human  by Osamu Dazai. It was recommended to me by an acquaintance who loves Japanese culture more than I do, and I put off  reading it for nearly a year. Then last night I started to write in my journal, with my beer-addled brain, "There is a strength that you get from needing no one. But it comes with a price: you will no longer be human. I will continue this thought when I have read Osamu Dazai's work. That phrase just leapt up in my mind, and that work called me."  So I read it, leaving that stupid introduction to a journal entry justifiably unfinished. Offhand, I could compare its atmosphere slightly to Camus's The Stranger , only more surreal (as only the Japanese can be - think Haruki Murakami without his gentleness of cadence, and instead of turning to the fantastic as Murakami does, Osamu Dazai turns to the psychological). Nuanced, this book is either a pull under the rug so massive you will fee...

On the way to the house I was remembering one of the things I blurted out in classes yesterday, said in the context of Marx's self-affirming labor in contrast to alienated labor, that because of the capitalist mechanisms that breed the latter we perhaps don't value durability the same way we did, perhaps in the context of when the former was possible.  I told students I love that word (and in that moment, I did, for it was only then that I realized) because what is durable might share its roots with duration , which might be dura (I was close, the Latin is durare , to harden, dura is the feminine of the masculine durus ), pertaining to what is hard. Hence the Filipino word for it: matibay , in turn connoting matigas , which makes the etymological root split, but somehow regains itself in Ilocano, natibker . In Ilocano it regains this unity of atmosphere, implying something that endures while still being battered by time, for it is time that truly batters.  Or there is nothi...

If you read  this , you will have a very sedate and overall substantial argumentation as to why the Batman v Superman movie will suck, probably. If you frequent 9gag, especially a few weeks back, you will be treated to all sorts of idiots who say that the movie sucked, without bothering to flesh out arguments (unless you scroll ten miles into the comments section). Allow me to mount a drunken defense why most of the said article's fears may be unfounded in some perspectives, by introducing those very same perspectives. I just have watched the movie, and it was good. Not amazing, not earth-shattering, but it was solid, it was good. Not like the Deadpool movie was good (because it's entertaining), however, and not like the Avengers franchise has been good so far (because it's been operating on a well-established shared universe, and the scriptwriting is witty).  If you take the perspective of someone who, like the article writer in the link above, noticed that DC...

I arrived in Baguio yesterday. The air is certainly cooler than it is in Manila, although daytime can make you sweat now. Went to have a brief dinner with two friends, with whom I also spent today, while sporadically working at scribie. I talked to them about my plans to leave, and I cannot help but feel that the more I talk about it, meaning the less I keep it inside me, the more real it is becoming, gaining shape in a real world that I no longer have a care for. I feel that I will confront the implications and reasoning behind that soon enough. After dinner last night, I went home, and watched Zetsuen no Tempest until 6:30 AM. It was an interesting enough anime, apparently, interweaving alien  powers (that weren't so obvious in that no aliens appeared), magic (that was very obvious, since there were mages of different powers - some speculated, some very actual), mythology (Nordic, Catholic, Eastern), literature (with very explicit references to The Tempest ,  Hamlet ,...

I am 12 episodes into Bakemonogatari , and I am still wondering why I made it this far. What I would remember this anime most for was the continuous, various, and ostensive illustrations of how Araragi Koyomi, the protagonist, is a pervert. Seriously, apart from the creators (Shaft) giving him hair antenna that serves as a metaphor for how his penis reacts half of the time, the cinematography focuses on what he focuses on when confronted with the females' bodies in a scene. And there are a lot of female characters in this anime, two girls his year, one girl his junior, another his sister's friend, and two other little girls. He has hair antenna reactions to all of them, what the hell, and there's only two other male characters in the entire thing. And to think this anime is about supernatural shit. So apart from the supernatural shenanigans he meddles around with (because he is constitutionally unable to not help people - who all turn out to be females - with their probl...

I decided to continue watching Hyouka after a grueling week of doing a departmental report that will neither get me paid nor mean much.  The protagonist, Oreki Houtarou, is a clever high-schooler who seems to always get entangled in mysteries, which only he can solve, since he is good at observation, deduction, and seeing obtuse connections.  It's a tribute to mystery writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, who the anime mentions often.  He ends up attributing his success to luck, after which he reverts to his default mode, which is one of detachment, conserving energy, and cynical yet proper responses to everything. Furthermore, however, it also turns out to be quite a deep exploration of how those who like the protagonist are both skilled and passionless, generate a complex relation with those with less competence but with more drive.  For one, those who are skilled but attribute their achievements to luck, and spend their lives with the possibili...