There you go. Thank you so much, Dominic. I am very delighted to be lecturing of the

SDAC today. I am definitely on board with everything you've said from the very beginning.

I love interdisciplinary work. I think there is so much to be said about enriching our

respective disciplines and learning from our areas of expertise without judgment and without

so much orthodoxy involved. So thank you so much for inviting me and giving me the opportunity

to share my work with your amazing students. So the title of my work is Pragmatism, Language

Claims, and the Philippine Drug War. I want to begin by talking about the photographs

that you're seeing at the front of the screen. The first photograph you see two men. The person

holding an armolite is the President of the Philippines. That's Rodrigo Duterte, who is

notorious for spearheading the current drug war in the country. So right now the body count is

more or less approximately 30,000. We're not quite sure because the government won't confirm

the real numbers. And next to him is Bato Dela Rosa, who is the ex-police chief and the mastermind

of the death squad. He was elected to the Philippine Senate in 2016. The second photo is a picture of

one of the first victims of Duterte's drug war, Michael Sharon, being cradled by his wife,

Jennifer Olyris. He was gunned down by masked men on motorcycles. And a note stating,

I am a drug pusher, don't follow my example, was found next to his dead body. The picture

received widespread attention when it was taken and has been compared to Michelangelo's La Pieta,

which you find in the last photograph. So the pandemic crisis, notwithstanding, President

Duterte remains very popular in the Philippines. He is a strongman politician, an outsider to

imperial Metro Manila, a foul-mouthed leader who tells it like it is and gets things done. So in

this case, Duterte's populist appeal is similar to that of Donald Trump of the US and Jair Bolsonaro

of Brazil. But this, of course, is stating the obvious. Other stories unique to the Philippines

can explain why so many Filipinos support Duterte and why 78% believe that the drug war is justified.

And one story, which I will tell today, involves religion. So new empirical research suggests that

the words religious leaders use can shape how they rationalize and respond to the drug war.

Describing drug users in the Philippines as sinners, a trope in religious language,

instead of describing them as victims, can be lethal. This particularly interesting twist in

terms of language use got my attention and got me very philosophically interested in the topic.

So what I want to do today is I want to use a philosophical framework that I'm developing,

and this is the framework of pragmatism. So in the work of Wurthi, Brandom, and Durrell,

I think that we can find a way to analyze the nature of what I call pernicious truth claims.

So in this paper, I interpret the idea of a sinner functioning as a truth claim in the culture of

militant Christianity and the Philippine drug war. I present how the use of this particular term can

inspire a minute uptake, redirect discursive focus, and engender certain social and political

actions. It sounds a bit not too technical, a little bit technical, but I'll go through that

very carefully throughout the presentation. So this talk is divided into four parts. First is

a preview of religion in the Philippine drug war. If you've read the pre-read link from New

Narrative, that's a public philosophy essay. I'm sure most of you will be familiar by now as to

how the culture of religion and militant Christianity is like in the country. The second part is where I

do philosophy. So I talk about pragmatism and language, and I concentrate on the work of

Wurthi, Brandom, and Durrell. So these are three separate philosophers from the same philosophical

tradition. So what I'm doing in my work is I'm putting together the insights from this particular

approach to philosophy and see how their philosophy of language can help make sense of why, you know,

using the word sinner leads people to support the killing of thousands and thousands of individuals

in the country with impunity. The third is where I apply the philosophical analysis on the word

sinner, focusing on the themes of uptake, focus, and engenderman. And finally, I conclude with three

things that I'm thinking about in terms of this research. So with that, part one, religion and the

Philippine drug war. Religion plays a key role in Filipino life. Of 105 million people, 74 million

are Catholics, 10 million are Christians, and the rest are members of various religious and atheist

groups. In the terrorist regime, the Philippine Catholic Church has been struggling to form a