“True philosophy entails relearning to see the world anew.”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
I approach philosophy as the disciplined effort to think about our thinking and to disclose and critically evaluate the basic presuppositions that we take for granted in forming a coherent perspective on the world and on ourselves. I think that as sense-making beings, we are always in the business of articulating a general perspective on the world and our place in it, however tentative and inchoate this perspective may be at the start. Accordingly, in my teaching, I try to show students that we are always already implicitly involved with the practice of philosophy even in our most specialized, practical, and humdrum pursuits. Ultimately, in my view, the goal of a philosophical education is to take our implicit, all-too-human concern with foundational notions that lie at the basis of all our sense-making – notions such as being, value, knowledge, and self – and to make that concern explicit and self-conscious, so that we can responsibly take charge of our own sense-making.
In my experience, a key barrier to entry for students when it comes to philosophy is the difficulty many have in seeing how the abstract and general subject matter of philosophy could be relevant to their most immediate concerns. In my teaching, I try to show students that the unresolved foundational problems of philosophy – like the problem of knowledge, or of explaining what we are – lie at the basis of the perspective on reality that they currently take to be “just obvious.” In my teaching, I approach philosophy as a practice of defamiliarizing and problematizing “the obvious.” Through this defamiliarization, I think that a philosophical education can reveal the most obvious, familiar and taken-for-granted things as sources of inexhaustible wonder. My hope is that by creating a community of practice in my classroom aimed at “relearning to see”, I can help students return to their most intimate concerns with fresh eyes.
Overall, I take my inspiration from Merleau-Ponty, who suggested that to be a philosopher is to approach life as “a perpetual beginner.” I try to show students that since we can all be “perpetual beginners”, we can establish through shared philosophical practice a common ground for serious intellectual discourse about what matters that bypasses the intellectual specialization of higher learning that otherwise separates us.
You can find a more detailed account of my teaching philosophy in the document below:
Elena Holmgren’s Teaching Philosophy
Upon request, I am happy to provide complete versions of my teaching dossier and teaching evaluations.