considering Hawaii wasn't a state until 1959, and it had the same territorial status the Phillippines, why was Pearl Harbor the catalyst for US involvement in WWII?
The US didn't declare war on Japan until Dec. 8 (although fighting obviously started with the attack on Pearl Harbor), but your chronology is a little off -- the attacks on US bases in the Philippines didn't start until about 10 hours after the strike on Pearl Harbor. Either one would have been the cause of hostilities between the two nations, because statehood or lack thereof is moot when you're directly attacking naval and land bases, killing soldiers and sailors, and so forth.
I have a few older answers about Pearl Harbor and Japan's motivation for that attack:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80xu8w/did_the_japanese_seriously_consider_invading/
" it had the same territorial status the Phillippines"
This isn't exactly true. Hawaii was an organized, incorporated territory under the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900. In effect this meant that it was considered an integral part of the US (the US constitution applied there), and under the Congressional organic act it had a territorial government and territorial constitution, as well as a nonvoting delegate to Congress.
The Philippines had been an organized territory under the 1902 Philippines Organic Act, but it was unincorporated - it wasn't considered an integral territory of the US where the US constitution fully applied. The distinction between "incorporated" and "unincorporated" was defined through a series of Supreme Court cases in 1901 - the so-called "Insular Cases". The Hare–Hawes–Cutting Act passed in 1933, which promised independence to the Philippines in ten years (ie, in 1943), and this was followed by the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934, which provided for a constitutional convention in the Philippines that resulted in a new Filipino government, complete with a President in a "Commonwealth of the Philippines". The Commonwealth was still in a colonial relationship with the United States, which maintained military forces there and had control over Filipino military forces, but it was much more in the style of a colonial protectorate - there no longer was a US Governor General, but a "High Commissioner to the Philippines", similar to an ambassador (although conveniently the last governor general and first high commissioner were the same person).
Anyway, the attack on the Philippines was a casus belli for the US declaration of war, as Franklin Roosevelt mentions it in his address to Congress on December 8. He mentions attacks on Guam and Wake Island, as well attacks on British forces in Malaya and Hong Kong. As for why Pearl Harbor comes first - did came first: the attacks on those other points began on the same day but shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the case of the Philippines, the attacks of December 8 (which was the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, just on the other side of the International Date Line) were limited to the air raid on Clark Field, and the invasion of Batan Island, so at the time of Roosevelt's address, these would have been relatively minor compared to the devastation and loss of life at Pearl Harbor.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/afc1986022.afc1986022_ms2201/?st=text