Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger (Topics In Historical Philosophy)

Feldman, Karen S.

ISBN 10: 0810122812 / ISBN 13: 9780810122819

Published by Northwestern University Press, 2006

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger (Topics In Historical Philosophy)
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810122812
• ISBN 13: 9780810122819
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

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Synopsis

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. 

About the Author

Karen S. Feldman is a lecturer in the departments of rhetoric and German at the University of California, Berkeley.