His primary aim in teaching was to provoke in his students a fundamental shift in sensibility and perspective from the mode of Critical intellection and reflection that characterizes Modernity and predominates in the academic world, to what he and Michael Polanyi called a Post-Critical mode of thinking. Instead of attending solely to the "what" of a topic (an item of content, a teaching, a matter to be subjected to intellectual mastery and critique as an indifferent object of thought), the shift involves becoming aware of the "how" of intellection itself — specifically of the "how" of one's responsive relationship as person in the world to the object of thought—of "how" one personally happens to be relating oneself to it. That "how" of intellection, the "how" of one's "personal" relation to the object of thought—in other words, the underlying relationship between knower and known—is predominantly tacit, difficult to articulate, and therefore not something on which one can easily reflect, which causes it to be all the more potentially consequential in the process of knowing. Poteat and Polanyi understood the Post-Critical mode of thinking to be the essential corrective and natural successor to the Critical approach to thinking and knowing, which tends to lose track of the "how" of knowing while presuming a relationship of hypercritical suspicion, guarded distance, and objectification to achieve "objective knowledge," from which personal presence and involvement are withheld or repressed. By presuming personal involvement in the process of knowing to be illegitimate, because it is thought to adulterate the objectivity of what is to be known, features of that knowledge that are the result of personal participation drop out of the resulting conception, including most notably the presence of the subject who is doing the knowing and who is indwelling the context and discerning the facts of that knowing. In their view, the Critical mode of thinking operates under the unacknowledged presumption that only such a depersonalized relationship can result in unadulterated truth. As a consequence, it is for the most part oblivious to the distortions attendant to such an impoverished and reductive relationship. In its idolization of objectivity, according to Poteat and other Post-Critical philosophers, the Critical perspective tends to lose entirely the contributions to knowing that come only through personal presence, "mindbodily" participation, empathy, caring, thoughtful hospitality, and sensitive and thoughtful interpretation —all aspects of what Poteat and Polanyi refer to as "indwelling".