Role: The New School of Social Research
New York, NY

  Contact: knowa512@newschool.edu

  Research Interests:
20th Century Continental Philosophy | Ancient Greek Philosophy | Political Theory

Adam Knowles recently completed his PhD in the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research with a dissertation that investigated the role silence in Heidegger’s reading of Ancient Greek philosophy through a feminist and postcolonial perspective. He has previously studied at the University of Texas at Austin and Ruprechts-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He specializes in 20^th-century Continental philosophy, Ancient Greek philosophy and political theory with a particular interest in philosophical investigations into the power of silence and silencing.

While at Emory, he pursued research into the philosophical valence of the right to remain silent. His project, entitled Mute of Malice: Law, Speech and the Vulnerability of Silence, investigates the possibility of meaningful silences and valid confessions within the framework of legal theory. The project seeks to apply Heidegger’s concept of the capacity for silence (das Schweigenkönnen) to the Miranda rights in order to ask if granting silence as an explicitly conferred right in fact renders a suspect’s capacity for silence impossible. Given that a free and uncoerced confession and the right to avoid self-incrimination are both central to the American legal process, Mute of Malice will ask what can count as a valid confession when the very act of utterance is inscribed within a set of power structures that eliminate the possibility for silence to be heard as silence.

Adam is an active translator of philosophical texts from German to English and has published an article in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy as well as chapters in the volumes Sources of Desire: Essays on Aristotle’s Theoretical Works and From Improvement to Development: Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia.