In this Book
- Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger
- Book
- 2006
- Published by: Northwestern University Press
summary
In a provactive work that brings new tools to the history of philosophy, Karen S. Feldman offers an elegant account of how philosophical language appears to produce the very thing it claims to describe. She demonstrates that conscience can only be described and understood through tropes and figures of langugae. If description in literal terms is impossible, as Binding Words convincingly argues, perhaps there is no such thing. But if the word "conscience" has no tangible referent, then how can conscience be constructed as binding? Does our conscience move us to do things, or is this yet another figure of speech?
Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and Heidegger's Being and Time dramatize conscience's relation to language and knowledge, morality and duty, and ontology. Feldman investigates how, within these works, conscience is described as binding upon us while at the same time asking how texts themselves may be read as binding.
Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and Heidegger's Being and Time dramatize conscience's relation to language and knowledge, morality and duty, and ontology. Feldman investigates how, within these works, conscience is described as binding upon us while at the same time asking how texts themselves may be read as binding.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Conclusion: The Frailties of Guarantee
- pp. 104-110
- Selected Bibliography
- pp. 137-154
Additional Information
ISBN
9780810162297
Related ISBN(s)
9780810122802, 9780810122819
MARC Record
OCLC
316604917
Pages
169
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No