Bloomsbury Academic Naïveté and Awakening: A Reflection on Awakened Subjectivity

Product Description The experience of realizing that something has slipped our notice is a common one and yet it has profound implications for how phenomenology - or the study of consciousness - relates to everyday life. When we reflect, we have a heightened ability to recognize and take note, but in the process of realization we become culpable for our failure to do so. Is this failure a form of naiveté then? Using quotidian examples, Kenneth Knies develops an original account of naiveté as a failure to take notice and suggests that humans are responsible for this failure because they have assumed a naïve position on the basis of the information that was not, but should have been available to them. For Edmund Husserl, the philosopher is responsible for recovering this naïve position from a wakeful perspective, so that owing to the magnitude of this task, they themselves are a subject of crisis. By placing Husserl in dialogue with other key thinkers in Continental philosophy such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, Kenneth Knies interrogates how transcendental subjectivity, or pure consciousness is discovered and what exactly it is responsible for. In doing so, he provides a thorough text suitable for advanced students and scholars interested in Continental philosophy, phenomenology, problems of responsibility and the philosophy of history. Review "This is a remarkable book. Knies has an unerring feel for phenomenological description and writes in an elegant, jargon-free style accessible even to readers who have no prior knowledge of Husserl and the phenomenological tradition. In a completely original way, Knies moves from an analysis of what it is to "presuppose" something to a defense of transcendental phenomenology as "awakening" to a "naivete" for which we henceforth become responsible. What Husserl called "crisis" thus belongs to subjectivity as well as to history, a theme that is deeply pursued in this exemplary work of philosophy. A must-read." --Steven Crowell, Mullen Professor of Humanities, Rice University, USA"Returning to the things themselves with philosophical acumen and philological accuracy, Kenneth Knies's Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology sets an excellent example of how to do phenomenology with and beyond Husserl about crucial concerns that he and we share, for example, the power of presuppositions, the force of awakenings, the attraction of attitudes, the necessity of appropriations, and the significance of seriousness-just to name a few." --George Heffernan, Professor of Philosophy, Merrimack College, USA"Kenneth Knies offers an expansive investigation of the connection in Husserl's thinking between a phenomenology of consciousness and a phenomenology of awakening in a time of crisis. Based on a balanced combination of illuminating interpretations of Husserl's writings and suggestive developments of key phenomenological concepts, Knies' work ranges over a host of themes in exploring the complexity and challenge of self-reflection and self-responsibility, not only for the crisis of Husserl's time, but just as much for our own." --Nicolas De Warren, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, USA About the Author Kenneth Knies is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Sacred Heart University, Connecticut, USA.