Eskil J Elling

Education: Ph.D. (expected), Northwestern University, 2025; Master, École normale supérieure and École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2017; MA, Columbia University, 2016; BA, Roskilde University, 2015.

I work on the relationship between Hegel’s aesthetics and his philosophy of right. Specifically, my dissertation argues that Hegel views social life as essentially limited in its ability to realize freedom, because it depends on us developing a habitual, and hence unreflective, attitude towards social norms—they become “second nature”. Art suspends this habitual attitude by making us reflect on social norms as having a meaning that self-reflective (“spiritual”) beings such as ourselves can reconstruct and change. The project is an attempt to clarify the role of art in thinking about freedom. I argue that emancipatory thinking cannot focus solely on social and political questions. But instead of seeing art as either an escape from politics, or as itself essentially political, I argue that Hegel offers a plausible delimitation of the questions that should be solved by social and political institutions and those that art (and the rest of “absolute spirit”) can better address.

I deeply value teaching the history of philosophy as a series of alternative ways of viewing the world. If we properly understand these - if we not only accept that people have thought differently, but appreciate that they had reasons for doing so - we become better equipped to think about our own world in independent, critical, and creative ways. I like to stress the particular historical context in which a philosophical argument was formulated, and I focus a lot on cultivating the skills necessary to analyzing and writing about historical philosophy. But I also hope to make students see how even very old philosophical writings may have something to teach them about their own lives and the problems they face. This means that not only do students need keep an open mind about what they read; more importantly, the historical canon that we teach needs to be opened up to include new perspectives from traditionally marginalized groups, which have at all times contributed greatly to philosophical discussion, even if their contributions have been forgotten.