Being Guilty: Freedom, Responsibility, and Conscience in German Philosophy from Kant to Heidegger

What can guilt, the painful sting of the bad conscience, tell us about who we are as human beings? How can it be explained or justified? Being Guilty seeks to answer these questions through an examination of the views of Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Paul Rée, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on guilt, freedom, responsibility, and conscience.

The concept of guilt has not received sufficient attention from scholars working in the history of German philosophy. What's more, even individual thinkers wh...