Preciosa Regina de Joya

Preciosa de Joya studied philosophy in the Ateneo de Manila University, where she wrote an M.A. thesis on Walter Benjamin’s idea of history, developing an interest in historiography, religion, and aesthetics. In an attempt to reflect critically on and move beyond the limits of the discipline of philosophy, she took her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, under the supervision of Filipino historian, Reynaldo Ileto.

Her dissertation, entitled “In Search of Filipino Philosophy,” is a study of the intellectual landscape—the personages and the struggles involved in the shaping of philosophical practices in the Philippines, but also a questioning that explores the possibility of philosophical thinking beyond the spaces of academic discourse.

n reflecting on the phenomenon of errancy, my project hopes to explore that which philosophy has evicted from its domain, to retrieve what it has deemed unworthy of thought or what it has condemned as the impropriety of the “other,” of the “unphilosophical.” What concerns me are not the centers or mandalas of philosophical inquiry, but the far-flung regions of the philosophically minoritized, particularly in the Philippines and in Indonesia. In exploring the idea of errancy, I examine, first and foremost, the “high power of the false,” the crucial function of illusion or fiction in thought.

Secondly, I look beyond the dusty books and walls of academic philosophy, seeking thought in the flood of sights, smells, tastes, and sounds, which offers a wonderful contrast to the values of reason and will to truth. The aim in all this is to philosophize a corps perdu, not simply to understand the logic of the margins, but as Derrida point out, to take it as “an entirely other reckoning.”