“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 problems 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.
Philosophical Practice as an Antidote to the Erosion of Agency in the Age of AI
Increasingly, I am exploring ways to guide students to reflect on the moral implications of their interactions with AI when learning. Since, as a society, we have yet to find answers to the big questions concerning the ethical use of AI in educational contexts, my goal is to help students formulate better questions and to home in on what the fundamental ethical problems facing them really are. One such problem involves understanding that such technologies are not neutral, but instead redefine the criteria of what counts as practical success and fully developed agency. Accordingly, my immediate short- and long-term goal is to introduce students in each of my classes to the ethics of relying on AI for cognitive outsourcing, and to provide them with the conceptual tools they need for a more focused reflection on how each of their interactions with emerging information technologies contributes to reshaping their moral and epistemic agency, as well as reshaping the scope of their participation in our collective epistemic infrastructure.
Recently, there have been a great deal of unfocused appeals to the value of preserving our capacity for “critical thinking” in an age of increasing dependency on technology. What such “critical thinking” amounts to usually remains undefined (minimally, I take it to mean being the responsible source of one’s own sense-making, rather than becoming a passive consumer and editor of AI output). Moreover, how relying on AI could be relevant to cultivating such capacities remains poorly understood. It is my goal to show students how the exercise of philosophical reasoning, by encouraging our capacity for structuring our experience through systems thinking and for making explicit and reflecting on our foundational assumptions, is a powerful way of cultivating our capacity for autonomous agency.