[1][2][3][4] Ferriols' efforts are intimately linked to the broader Filipinization movement of the late 1960s to 1970s, a period marked by a shift toward the indigenization of knowledge production.
[3] His body of work is also influential to the development of phenomenological thought in the Philippines, in particular, in its interest in philosophizing lived experience.
[2][6] In 2016, he published the first volume of his memoirs Sulyap sa Aking Pinanggalingan (Glimpses Into My Beginnings) detailing his early life and his experience of the Second World War.
In the grassy roadways children of former farmers and of comers from elsewhere played together and talked to each other in something we called Tagalog.He continues: Then it was time to go to school.
In reflecting on the language of his youth decades later, and after a chance encounter with an old neighbor who spoke the same, he thought: "In six years, one comes to know that, for human thinking, North Sampalokese is better than Plato's Greek.
Ferriols taught at the defunct Berchmans College in Cebu City before he moved to Loyola School of Theology.
[9] Ferriols began his teaching of philosophy in Filipino in 1969 at the Ateneo de Manila University and early on faced much skepticism from the administration.
The Tagalog ground swell was noiseless, invisible, but tangy enough to cause tremors in the delicate nostrils of both civil and ecclesiastical politicians—those connoisseurs of hidden currents.
[1] Critics of the approach point to the practice as unnecessary considering that most educated Filipinos who might be interested in philosophy or in philosophizing spoke, wrote, and read in English.