An archive is an integral part of literate and social life and is in the custody of political institutions for their historical value. It is argued that societies who lack the faculty of recording histories contribute to the archive-making process in a different context. To advance this, the work of anthropologists on the Igorots, more specifically the Kalingas, of the Philippine Cordilleras, and their tattooing practices are considered for heuristic purposes. It is in these societies, where the concept of the (...) Western archive is absent, that the body becomes a repository of significant life events and rituals concretized by tattoos. Tattooing becomes a form of memory on how bodies remember and create narratives and counter-narratives. To serve as a provocation for further research, Derrida’s two-fold understanding of the archive is utilized. The archive, on the one hand, as a commencement that evokes the writing of the archive and, on the other hand, the understanding of the tattoos as disjointed and incomplete, allows us to understand tattoos as a trace. (shrink)

Using Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas’s other, the paper argues that philosophy’s involvement with nonphenomenality necessarily leads to a discussion of the im/possibility of God. Because the nonphenomenal is proper to God, then the theological trap becomes explicit in the study of philosophy. The paper operates within an exposition of Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” while arguing in three sections. The first section discusses the theological trap implicit in Levinas and the language that he engages. The limitations of this theological language (...) and the negativity involved in the discussion of the other leads us to consider difference as nonphenomenal. The second section investigates the violence that language entails in Derrida’s understanding of Levinas’s Husserl and Heidegger. This is to demonstrate the point made in section one and to bridge the idea to section three, which investigates the limitations of this language and its implications to any understanding of God as the effect of the trace. If anything, the paper utilizes Derrida’s reading of Levinas to argue for the theological trap and the understanding of God as the effect of the trace. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Karl Rahner’s understanding of human freedom and transcendental anthropology. Karl Rahner is one of the most famous Catholic theologian and philosopher of the twentieth century. His transcendental anthropology is a philosophical understanding of the human person grounded in the basic tenets of Christian thought. In relation to this, Rahner speaks of freedom in two ways: categorical and transcendental freedom. By transcendental freedom, Rahner speaks of freedom as an essential capacity constitutive of the human person. By categorical freedom, (...) he refers to the human person’s ability to use the essential capacity of freedom. From this distinction, the author discusses Rahner’s controversial understanding of analogous sin. In here, the author questions the role of freedom and the reality of sin. He concludes by articulating the implications of this understanding of freedom to philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

The article considers Richard Rorty’s thought on pragmatic religion and meliorism. It begins with Rorty’s critique of theism and Platonism, and his attempt to rehabilitate religion using a pragmatist framework. The article then offers an analysis of Rorty’s “unjustifiable hope”. Here, the author distinguishes the differentsenses of unjustifiable hope. With a tension between the “romantic” and “utilitarian” aspects of this outlook, the paper concludes with the advent of Rorty’s pragmatic religion.