Hubbry Logo
Charles Taylor (philosopher)Charles Taylor (philosopher)Main
Open search
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Community hub
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
logo
8 pages, 0 posts
0 subscribers
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Contribute something
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
View on Wikipedia
from Wikipedia

Key Information

Part of a series on
Catholic philosophy
  
Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham
Ethics
Metaphysics
Schools
Philosophers
Ancient
Medieval
Modern
Contemporary

Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FRSC FBA (born November 5, 1931) is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.

In 2007, Taylor served with Gérard Bouchard on the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation with regard to cultural differences in the province of Quebec. He has also made contributions to moral philosophy, epistemology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of action.[15][16]

Early life and education

[edit]

Charles Margrave Taylor was born in Montreal, Quebec, on November 5, 1931, to a Roman Catholic Francophone mother and a Protestant Anglophone father by whom he was raised bilingually.[17][18] His father, Walter Margrave Taylor, was a steel magnate originally from Toronto while his mother, Simone Marguerite Beaubien, was a dressmaker.[19] His sister was Gretta Chambers.[20]

He attended Selwyn House School from 1939 to 1946,[21][22] followed by Trinity College School from 1946 to 1949,[23] and began his undergraduate education at McGill University where he received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in history in 1952.[24] He continued his studies at the University of Oxford, first as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, receiving a BA degree with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics in 1955, and then as a postgraduate student, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1961[2][25] under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin.[26] As an undergraduate student, he started one of the first campaigns to ban thermonuclear weapons in the United Kingdom in 1956,[27] serving as the first president of the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[28] Recent research has explored Taylor's engagement with socialist politics during this time.[29]

Career

[edit]

He succeeded John Plamenatz as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and became a fellow of All Souls College.[30]

For many years, both before and after Oxford, he was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, where he is now professor emeritus.[31] Taylor was also a Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for several years after his retirement from McGill.

Taylor was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.[32] In 1991, Taylor was appointed to the Conseil de la langue française in the province of Quebec, at which point he critiqued Quebec's commercial sign laws. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec.

In 2007 he and Gérard Bouchard were appointed to head a one-year commission of inquiry into what would constitute reasonable accommodation for minority cultures in his home province of Quebec.[33]

Awards

[edit]

In 1997 he was awarded the Hegel Prize.[34] In 2003, he was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's Gold Medal for Achievement in Research, which had been the council's highest honour.[35][36] He was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities, which included a cash award of US$1.5 million. In June 2008, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category. The Kyoto Prize is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Nobel.[37] In 2015, he was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a prize he shared with philosopher Jürgen Habermas.[38] In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural $1-million Berggruen Prize for being "a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity".[39]

Views

[edit]

Despite his extensive and diverse philosophical oeuvre,[40] Taylor famously calls himself a "monomaniac,"[41] concerned with only one fundamental aspiration: to develop a convincing philosophical anthropology.

In order to understand Taylor's views, it is helpful to understand his philosophical background, especially his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Taylor rejects naturalism and formalist epistemology. He is part of an influential intellectual tradition of Canadian idealism that includes John Watson, George Paxton Young, C. B. Macpherson, and George Grant.[42][dubious – discuss]

In his essay "To Follow a Rule," Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, and what kind of knowledge it is that allows a person to successfully follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions, we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions.[43]

Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background. This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life." More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits, dispositions and tendencies.[43]

Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On occasion we do follow rules by explicitly representing them to ourselves, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application: application requires that we draw on an unarticulated understanding or "sense of things" — the background.[43]

Critique of naturalism

[edit]
Taylor in 2012

Taylor defines naturalism as a family of various, often quite diverse theories that all hold "the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences."[44] Philosophically, naturalism was largely popularized and defended by the unity of science movement that was advanced by logical positivist philosophy. In many ways, Taylor's early philosophy springs from a critical reaction against the logical positivism and naturalism that was ascendant in Oxford while he was a student.

Initially, much of Taylor's philosophical work consisted of careful conceptual critiques of various naturalist research programs. This began with his 1964 dissertation The Explanation of Behaviour, which was a detailed and systematic criticism of the behaviourist psychology of B. F. Skinner[45] that was highly influential at mid-century.

From there, Taylor also spread his critique to other disciplines. The essay "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man" was published in 1972 as a critique of the political science of the behavioural revolution advanced by giants of the field like David Easton, Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, and Sydney Verba.[46] In an essay entitled "The Significance of Significance: The Case for Cognitive Psychology", Taylor criticized the naturalism he saw distorting the major research program that had replaced B. F. Skinner's behaviourism.[47]

But Taylor also detected naturalism in fields where it was not immediately apparent. For example, in 1978's "Language and Human Nature" he found naturalist distortions in various modern "designative" theories of language,[48] while in Sources of the Self (1989) he found both naturalist error and the deep moral, motivational sources for this outlook[clarification needed] in various individualist and utilitarian conceptions of selfhood.[citation needed]

Taylor and hermeneutics

[edit]

Concurrent to Taylor's critique of naturalism was his development of an alternative. Indeed, Taylor's mature philosophy begins when as a doctoral student at Oxford he turned away, disappointed, from analytic philosophy in search of other philosophical resources which he found in French and German modern hermeneutics and phenomenology.[49]

The hermeneutic tradition develops a view of human understanding and cognition as centred on the decipherment of meanings (as opposed to, say, foundational theories of brute verification or an apodictic rationalism). Taylor's own philosophical outlook can broadly and fairly be characterized as hermeneutic and has been called engaged hermeneutics.[14] This is clear in his championing of the works of major figures within the hermeneutic tradition such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer.[50] It is also evident in his own original contributions to hermeneutic and interpretive theory.[50]

Communitarian critique of liberalism

[edit]
Part of a series on
Communitarianism
Principles
Intellectuals
Related topics

Taylor (as well as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel) is associated with a communitarian critique of liberal theory's understanding of the "self". Communitarians emphasize the importance of social institutions in the development of individual meaning and identity.

In his 1991 Massey Lecture The Malaise of Modernity, Taylor argued that political theorists—from John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin—have neglected the way in which individuals arise within the context supplied by societies. A more realistic understanding of the "self" recognizes the social background against which life choices gain importance and meaning.

Philosophy and sociology of religion

[edit]
Further information: A Secular Age and Secularity § Taylorian secularity

Taylor's later work has turned to the philosophy of religion, as evident in several pieces, including the lecture "A Catholic Modernity" and the short monograph "Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited".[51]

Taylor's most significant contribution in this field to date is his book A Secular Age which argues against the secularization thesis of Max Weber, Steve Bruce, and others.[52] In rough form, the secularization thesis holds that as modernity (a bundle of phenomena including science, technology, and rational forms of authority) progresses, religion gradually diminishes in influence. Taylor begins from the fact that the modern world has not seen the disappearance of religion but rather its diversification and in many places its growth.[53] He then develops a complex alternative notion of what secularization actually means given that the secularization thesis has not been borne out. In the process, Taylor also greatly deepens his account of moral, political, and spiritual modernity that he had begun in Sources of the Self.

Politics

[edit]

Taylor was a candidate for the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) in Mount Royal on three occasions in the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 federal election when he came in third behind Liberal Alan MacNaughton. He improved his standing in 1963, coming in second. Most famously, he also lost in the 1965 election to newcomer and future prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. This campaign garnered national attention. Taylor's fourth and final attempt to enter the House of Commons of Canada was in the 1968 federal election, when he came in second as an NDP candidate in the riding of Dollard. In 1994 he coedited a paper on human rights with Vitit Muntarbhorn in Thailand.[54]

Taylor served as a vice president of the federal NDP (beginning c. 1965)[28] and was president of its Quebec section.[55]

In 2010, Taylor said multiculturalism was a work in progress that faced challenges. He identified tackling Islamophobia in Canada as the next challenge.[56]

In his 2020 book Reconstructing Democracy he, together with Patrizia Nanz and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor, uses local examples to describe how democracies in transformation might be revitalized by involving citizenship.[57]

Interlocutors

[edit]

Published works

[edit]

Books

[edit]
  • The Explanation of Behaviour. Routledge Kegan Paul. 1964.
  • The Pattern of Politics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1970.
  • Erklärung und Interpretation in den Wissenschaften vom Menschen (in German). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1975.
  • Hegel. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1975.
  • Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1979.
  • Social Theory as Practice. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1983.[a]
  • Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1985.
  • Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1985.
  • The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press. 1991.[b]
  • The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press. 1991.
  • Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition". Edited by Gutmann, Amy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1992.[c]
  • Rapprocher les solitudes: écrits sur le fédéralisme et le nationalisme au Canada [Reconciling the Solitudes: Writings on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism] (in French). Edited by Laforest, Guy. Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval. 1992.
    • English translation: Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Edited by Laforest, Guy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1993.
  • Road to Democracy: Human Rights and Human Development in Thailand. With Muntarbhorn, Vitit. Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. 1994.
  • Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1995.
  • Identitet, Frihet och Gemenskap: Politisk-Filosofiska Texter (in Swedish). Edited by Grimen, Harald. Gothenburg, Sweden: Daidalos. 1995.
  • De politieke Cultuur van de Moderniteit (in Dutch). The Hague, Netherlands: Kok Agora. 1996.
  • La liberté des modernes (in French). Translated by de Lara, Philippe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1997.
  • A Catholic Modernity? Edited by Heft, James L. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999.
  • Prizivanje gradjanskog drustva [Invoking Civil Society] (in Serbo-Croatian). Edited by Savic, Obrad.
  • Wieviel Gemeinschaft braucht die Demokratie? Aufsätze zur politische Philosophie (in German). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2002.
  • Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2002.
  • Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2004.
  • A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2007.
  • Laïcité et liberté de conscience (in French). With Maclure, Jocelyn. Montreal: Boréal. 2010.
    • English translation: Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. With Maclure, Jocelyn. Translated by Todd, Jane Marie. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2011.
  • Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2011.
  • Church and People: Disjunctions in a Secular Age. Edited with Casanova, José; McLean, George F. Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. 2012.
  • Democracia Republicana / Republican Democracy. Edited by Cristi, Renato; Tranjan, J. Ricardo. Santiago: LOM Ediciones. 2012.
  • Boundaries of Toleration. Edited with Stepan, Alfred C. New York: Columbia University Press. 2014.
  • Incanto e Disincanto. Secolarità e Laicità in Occidente (in Italian). Edited and translated by Costa, Paolo. Bologna, Italy: EDB. 2014.
  • La Democrazia e i Suoi Dilemmi (in Italian). Edited and translated by Costa, Paolo. Parma, Italy: Diabasis. 2014.
  • Les avenues de la foi : Entretiens avec Jonathan Guilbault (in French). Montreal: Novalis. 2015.
    • English translation: Avenues of Faith: Conversations with Jonathan Guilbault. Translated by Shalter, Yanette. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. 2020.
  • Retrieving Realism. With Dreyfus, Hubert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2015.
  • The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016.
  • Reconstructing Democracy. How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up. With Nanz, Patrizia; Beaubien Taylor, Madeleine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2020
  • Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2024.

Selected book chapters

[edit]

See also

[edit]

Notes

[edit]

References

[edit]

Further reading

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Charles Taylor (philosopher)

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia

Charles Margrave Taylor (born November 5, 1931) is a Canadian philosopher and professor emeritus of political science and philosophy at McGill University, recognized for his extensive contributions to political theory, ethics, and the historical analysis of modernity.
Taylor's philosophical inquiries emphasize the embeddedness of human agency in moral horizons and communal practices, critiquing reductive individualism and instrumental reason prevalent in modern liberalism.
His seminal works, including Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), which traces the evolution of the modern moral imagination through key figures from Descartes to Foucault, and A Secular Age (2007), which examines the sociocultural conditions enabling or inhibiting religious belief in contemporary society, have profoundly influenced debates on identity, secularity, and the self.
In political philosophy, Taylor's essay "The Politics of Recognition" (1992) argues for the ethical necessity of acknowledging cultural differences within liberal democracies, shaping discussions on multiculturalism while highlighting tensions between universal rights and particular identities.
Among his numerous accolades, Taylor received the Templeton Prize in 2007 for advancing understanding of religion's role in human affairs, the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2008, and the John W. Kluge Prize in 2015 for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences.

Biography

Early Life and Education

Charles Margrave Taylor was born on November 5, 1931, in , , , the youngest of three children in a bilingual household shaped by his parents' distinct cultural and religious backgrounds. His father, Walter Margrave Taylor, was an English-speaking who worked in the steel industry as an industrialist. His mother, Simone Beaubien, was a French-speaking Roman Catholic and a fashion designer. Raised in the Outremont borough of during the , Taylor experienced a mixed religious environment, attending due to his mother's influence while his father's contributed to a diverse familial dynamic. Taylor pursued his undergraduate education at in , earning a degree in history in 1952. As a Rhodes Scholar, he then attended the University of 's Balliol College, where he completed a second in in 1955. He remained at to pursue graduate studies, earning his in 1961 under the supervision of and . This period at marked the beginning of Taylor's deep engagement with philosophical and political thought, influenced by the intellectual environment there.

Academic Career and Public Engagement

Taylor joined McGill University in 1961 as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, advancing to associate professor and then full professor of political science and philosophy. From 1961 to 1976, he held these positions at McGill prior to his appointment at Oxford. In 1976, Taylor was appointed Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, succeeding Isaiah Berlin, and became a fellow of All Souls College, serving until 1981. Following his return to Canada, he resumed his role at McGill as professor of philosophy and political science until 1997, after which he was named professor emeritus in 1998. Later, from 2002 to 2008, he served as Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. Throughout his career, Taylor engaged actively in Canadian politics, aligning with the social democratic (NDP). He ran as the NDP candidate for the federal riding of Mount Royal in 1962 and 1965, and served as president of the section of the NDP. As a proponent of , Taylor advocated for "deep diversity" and asymmetrical federal arrangements to accommodate Quebec's distinct society within the federation, critiquing uniform liberal models. In 1990–1995, he participated prominently in Quebec's political debates on and unity, opposing while supporting reforms for greater provincial autonomy. Taylor co-authored Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian and Nationalism in 1993, articulating a framework for balancing unity and difference. In 2007–2008, he co-chaired the Quebec government's Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (Bouchard-Taylor Commission) with Gérard Bouchard, recommending measures to integrate immigrants while preserving Quebec's secularism and interculturalism amid debates on religious accommodations.

Personal Beliefs and Influences

Charles Taylor identifies as a practicing Roman Catholic, a commitment that profoundly shapes his philosophical inquiries into , , and the human search for meaning. Raised in a Catholic family in , Taylor experienced a period of lapse from the faith during his early adulthood, particularly amid the intellectual ferment of mid-20th-century academia, before returning to active practice later in life. This personal trajectory informs his advocacy for integrating into public discourse, viewing Catholicism as offering a and communal path to transcendence amid secular pressures. Taylor's beliefs emphasize the enduring plausibility of faith in , critiquing reductive naturalism while affirming a and the quest for "fullness" beyond immanent frames of exclusive . He argues that , particularly in its Catholic expression, counters modern by sanctifying ordinary life and pursuing higher aspirations, as explored in works like A Secular Age (2007). This perspective rejects atheism's triumph narrative, positing instead that belief involves ongoing navigation of doubt and cross-pressures in pluralistic societies. Philosophically, Taylor draws heavily from G. W. F. Hegel, whose 1975 interpretation revitalized Hegelian thought by stressing its metaphysical dimensions and communitarian implications against liberal individualism. His early analytic training evolved into hermeneutic approaches influenced by and , prioritizing interpretation in understanding human agency and historical embeddedness. Additional shapers include Johann Gottfried Herder's emphasis on cultural particularity and Johann Georg Hamann's critique of Enlightenment rationalism, alongside Wittgenstein's linguistic insights, fostering Taylor's rejection of atomistic selfhood in favor of dialogical, expressive identities.

Philosophical Foundations

Critique of Naturalism and Reductionism

Taylor's critique of naturalism and reductionism originates in his early work, particularly The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), where he targets as a paradigmatic form of reductionist explanation in the human sciences. He argues that behaviorist models, which seek to explain actions through correlations of stimuli and responses akin to natural scientific laws, inevitably distort human agency by stripping away its intentional structure and normative context. For Taylor, is not mere mechanical response but purposive action oriented by reasons, beliefs, and evaluations that demand interpretive understanding rather than causal prediction. This foundational objection extends to broader naturalism, the view that all phenomena, including human and , can be fully explained by non-normative, scientific methods without residue. In Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: Human Agency and Language (1985), Taylor traces naturalism's historical rise in and contends that it fails to accommodate the "irreducibly first-person" perspective of agents, wherein self-understanding involves qualitative distinctions—like the difference between dignified and degrading motivations—that resist translation into third-person, value-neutral terms. Naturalistic reductions, he maintains, presuppose a "disengaged" stance that flattens the moral of human life, rendering incoherent the very capacity for strong evaluation (discerning higher and lower goods) that defines practical reason. Taylor further critiques reductionism's atomistic tendencies, as seen in empiricist epistemologies that decompose meaning into discrete, context-free units. Drawing on ordinary language analysis, he demonstrates how such approaches overlook the holistic, language-embedded of human understanding, where concepts gain significance only within webs of interlocution and shared practices. This is evident in his rejection of "," not itself, but the overreach of naturalistic paradigms into domains requiring hermeneutic engagement, such as and -interpretation. By privileging causal realism over interpretive depth, naturalism, per Taylor, engenders a "thin" conception of the , incompatible with the thick, value-laden realities of . Empirical adequacy bolsters his case: attempts to naturalize agency, from neuroscientific claims about "free will illusions" to economic models of rational choice, falter when confronted with agents' inescapable first-person , as Taylor illustrates through examples where reductive explanations beg the question by assuming the very neutralism they aim to justify. His position aligns with phenomenological insights, emphasizing that human sciences must integrate and understanding, lest they devolve into ideological enforcement of a flattened .

Hermeneutics and the Role of Interpretation

Taylor maintains that human beings are self-interpreting animals, whose actions and identities are constituted through ongoing processes of interpretation embedded in , , and moral horizons. This view posits that understanding requires grasping the meanings agents ascribe to their own lives, rather than reducing it to observable causes or brute . Interpretation, in Taylor's framework, involves —an empathetic penetration into the agent's experiential framework—to discern how actions cohere within their web of significances. In distinguishing the human sciences from natural sciences, Taylor argues that the former cannot rely solely on verification through empirical prediction, as human meanings are intersubjective and historically situated, defying the causal laws applicable to non-intentional phenomena. Natural sciences explain via underlying mechanisms independent of the subject's self-understanding, whereas human sciences demand interpretive recovery of the agent's "language of mutual understanding" that defines social practices. He critiques behaviorist approaches for treating actions as mere responses, ignoring how meanings are constitutive: for instance, voting in an gains sense only within a shared political horizon, not as isolated stimuli. Taylor's hermeneutics extends to "strong" forms of interpretation, where explanations in the human sciences may involve rival accounts that challenge or refine the agent's own self-interpretation, leading to deeper insight into . This contrasts with "weak" hermeneutics, which merely decodes surface intentions without probing underlying evaluations of worth—such as distinctions between noble and base desires that shape human striving. Through this lens, interpretation retrieves pre-reflective backgrounds of practical reason, enabling agents to articulate and potentially transform their identities against horizons of significance. Taylor's approach thus underscores causal realism in human affairs: interpretations are not epiphenomenal but integral to the constitution of agency itself.

Epistemology of Human Agency

Charles Taylor's epistemology of human agency posits that knowledge of human actions cannot be reduced to third-person causal explanations or behavioral observations, as humans are inherently self-interpreting animals whose agency is constituted by the meanings they ascribe to their desires, motivations, and evaluations. In this framework, outlined in his 1985 collection Human Agency and Language, understanding agency requires engaging the agent's first-person perspective, where actions are not mere responses to stimuli but expressions of strong evaluations—discriminations between higher and lower goods that shape identity and purpose beyond instrumental preferences. Taylor argues that reductive naturalism, such as , fails because it abstracts agency from these interpretive layers, treating humans as disembedded subjects whose intentions are epistemically inaccessible without the agent's own articulations. Central to Taylor's account is the idea that self-interpretation is not optional but constitutive of agency, enabling agents to reflexively grasp their position among and thereby achieve a sense of orientation. For instance, an action like refusing a promotion might be inexplicable through causal alone but becomes intelligible when interpreted through the agent's of prioritizing family over career advancement as a higher good. This hermeneutic dimension implies that epistemological access to agency demands dialogical methods—conversations or narratives that articulate latent understandings—rather than detached observation. Taylor contrasts this with mechanistic views, noting that without self-interpretation, humans would lack the capacity for responsibility, as actions would dissolve into unowned reflexes devoid of evaluative content. Taylor further contends that language plays an indispensable role in this , serving not merely as a descriptor but as a medium through which agents articulate and refine their interpretations, thereby making agency publicly accessible and corrigible. In essays like "What is Human Agency?", he critiques epistemologies that privilege neutral, value-free , arguing they engender a flattened moral ontology where weak desires (e.g., immediate gratifications) eclipse strong ones, distorting self-knowledge. Empirical support for this comes from Taylor's analysis of historical shifts, such as the modern of the world, which he links to an epistemology that severs agency from transcendent sources, leading to . Ultimately, Taylor's approach demands an attuned to the of agency in communal practices and moral horizons, ensuring that knowledge claims about respect the irreducibly normative structure of action.

Moral Philosophy and the Modern Self

Sources of the Self: Moral Frameworks in Modernity

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, published in 1989 by , traces the historical constitution of the modern self through an examination of evolving frameworks of strong evaluation—human capacities to discriminate among goods and orient agency toward higher ones. Taylor argues that modernity's identity emerges not from a neutral proceduralism or reductive naturalism, but from substantive commitments inherited and transformed from earlier epochs, including Augustinian inwardness, providential , and Enlightenment universalism. These frameworks, he maintains, underpin the modern subject's disengaged stance toward the world, which Taylor portrays as a deliberate achievement rather than a mere epistemological error, enabling deeper articulations of human dignity and freedom. The book structures this genealogy across five parts, beginning with foundational reflections on identity and , then charting shifts in inwardness, nature's voice, and subtler expressive languages. Taylor identifies three interlocking moral intuitions as constitutive of modern frameworks: the affirmation of ordinary life, the ideal of universal benevolence, and the expressivist pursuit of authenticity. The first, rooted in the 16th- and 17th-century Reformed ethic of vocation—exemplified in Calvinist and Puritan thought—elevates mundane activities like labor, family, and civic duty to spheres of intrinsic moral significance, inverting medieval hierarchies that privileged monastic or heroic pursuits. This shift, Taylor notes, draws initial force from theistic sources positing divine providence in everyday providence, fostering a buffered self capable of instrumental mastery over nature. Complementing this is the second intuition, emerging from 17th- and 18th-century rationalism and sentiment theories (as in Locke and Hutcheson), which posits an ethic of mutual aid and impartial justice as a universal human endowment, often grounded in natural teleology or divine order. Taylor emphasizes how these elements interweave to form modernity's "malaise of immanence," where moral horizons expand yet risk flattening into instrumental reason alone. The third framework, the Romantic expressivism of the late 18th and 19th centuries—from Herder to Hegel—prioritizes the unique inner voice of the self, demanding authenticity as a against conformist or utilitarian norms. Taylor reconstructs this as a deepening of earlier inward turns, such as Descartes' cogito and Rousseau's sentiment of existence, but warns that its secularized forms engender conflicts, as the self's horizons become atomized without transcendent anchors. Critiquing naturalist reductions that dismiss these intuitions as illusory, Taylor defends their ontological status through a hermeneutic retrieval, insisting that presupposes such frameworks for any coherent self-understanding. He illustrates this via engagements with figures like Montaigne, who prefigured modern subjectivity's dialogical depth, and Kant, whose synthesizes autonomy with universal law, though at the cost of eclipsing particular goods. Ultimately, Taylor's analysis reveals modernity's moral pluralism as both empowering and fraught, urging a recovery of forgotten sources to navigate contemporary hypergoods like without reductive denial.

Individualism versus Embedded Selves

Taylor contrasts the modern conception of the self as disengaged and buffered with pre-modern notions of porous, embedded selves. The buffered self, emerging prominently during the late medieval and early modern periods, is characterized by inwardness, invulnerability to external spiritual or cosmic forces, and a focus on personal and rational control. This view, which Taylor traces through figures like Descartes and Locke, prioritizes the individual's disengagement from social and natural embeddings to achieve instrumental mastery over the world. In contrast, embedded selves in earlier epochs were porous, directly shaped by and vulnerable to communal practices, rituals, and transcendent orders, where identity derived meaning from participation in larger moral and cosmic horizons rather than isolated self-definition. In Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), Taylor argues that while the buffered self enabled scientific and economic advances by affirming ordinary life and inward dignity, it risks atomistic individualism, reducing persons to self-sufficient units detached from constitutive social goods. Atomism, as Taylor critiques it in his essay "Atomism" (1985), posits individuals as ontologically prior to society, with rights and choices forming the basis of political order, thereby undermining the dialogical and intersubjective formation of identity. He counters this with a holistic view: human agency and authenticity require "webs of interlocution"—ongoing dialogues within communities that provide languages of moral discernment and strong evaluation, distinguishing higher from lower goods. Without such embeddings, modern individualism devolves into instrumental reason or narcissistic self-expression, lacking the horizons of significance necessary for genuine self-realization. Taylor's framework reconciles individualism's valid emphasis on personal with by advocating a " of deep diversity," where selves flourish through mutual recognition in pluralistic societies, not neutral proceduralism. This avoids both pre-modern hierarchical embeddings that suppress individuality and hyper-modern that erodes communal bonds, proposing instead that modern gains depth from recovered sources like theistic affirmation of creation or civic . Empirical support for Taylor's concerns appears in studies of rising and identity fragmentation in highly individualized societies, where self-reported correlates with strong relational ties over isolated . His position, rooted in Hegelian dialogism and Aristotelian , challenges reductive naturalism by insisting that selves are irreducibly interpretative, constituted by narrative identities interwoven with historical and cultural practices.

Political Philosophy

Communitarian Critique of Liberal Neutrality

Charles Taylor critiques the liberal commitment to state neutrality as an unattainable ideal that masks a substantive endorsement of and as the default moral framework. In procedural , as exemplified by John Rawls's theory of justice, the state purportedly refrains from favoring any particular conception of the good, relying instead on neutral principles of right to adjudicate conflicts. Taylor argues, however, that this neutrality is illusory because the liberal framework itself presupposes a specific of the —one that prioritizes disengaged reason and the "unencumbered" , detached from communal horizons of significance. Such a view, Taylor contends, cannot be value-neutral; it privileges a modern, atomistic understanding of agency over embedded, dialogical forms of rooted in community practices and strong evaluations. Central to Taylor's position is the rejection of methodological in liberal theory, which posits society as an aggregate of independent individuals whose rights precede communal obligations. In his essay "," Taylor maintains that human agency is inherently social, with individuals' capacities for moral discernment emerging through inescapable intersubjective relations and shared languages of worth. Liberal neutrality, by bracketing these communal dimensions in public reasoning, effectively undermines non-individualistic ways of life, such as those emphasizing collective honor or , rendering them peripheral or irrational within the . This critique echoes broader communitarian concerns but is grounded in Taylor's hermeneutic emphasis on : public institutions cannot operate without implicit moral orientations, and liberalism's attempt to purge them leads to a flattened civic space that erodes the conditions for authentic selfhood. Taylor extends this analysis to the politics of recognition, where liberal neutrality falters in addressing demands for cultural affirmation. While advances a "politics of equal dignity" through universal rights, it struggles with a "politics of difference" that requires acknowledging diverse identities without subsuming them under a homogenized framework. Neutrality here exacerbates exclusion, as the liberal presumption of equal treatment ignores how systemic biases favor dominant (often secular-individualist) narratives, marginalizing minority communities whose goods are incommensurable with liberal . Taylor proposes a balanced approach: democracies must foster dialogical public spaces that integrate substantive goods without , allowing for mutual contestation rather than imposed impartiality. This does not abandon but reconstructs it communally, recognizing that true pluralism demands engaging, not evading, moral horizons.

Politics of Recognition and Multiculturalism

Charles Taylor's seminal essay "The Politics of Recognition," originally delivered as a lecture in 1991 and published in 1994, posits that human is inherently dialogical, requiring affirmation from significant others to achieve authenticity. Drawing on Hegelian dialectics, Taylor argues that misrecognition—denying or devaluing another's identity—inflicts a form of by distorting self-understanding, akin to a psychological that hinders personal . This framework shifts beyond traditional liberal emphasis on equal dignity (the "politics of universalism") to encompass a "politics of difference," where cultural particularities demand specific acknowledgment to counteract historical assimilation pressures. Taylor maintains that while recognition presupposes a baseline presumption of equal cultural worth, it does not entail uncritical ; instead, it invites ongoing rational to evaluate cultural practices against horizons of moral significance. In applying this to multiculturalism, Taylor critiques atomistic for overlooking how identities are embedded in communal narratives, rendering neutral proceduralism insufficient for diverse societies. He advocates policies that balance individual with collective cultural survival, exemplified by 's linguistic mandates under Bill 101 (enacted 1977), which prioritize French usage in public signage and education to preserve francophone identity amid anglophone dominance. Taylor, a intellectual and former with the (1961–1977), supported constitutional recognition of as a "distinct society" in the failed (1987–1990) and (1992), arguing that such designations enable to accommodate without . These positions reflect his communitarian view that must evolve to incorporate "deep diversity," where subnational groups negotiate exemptions from uniform to safeguard viability, as seen in indigenous land claims or Sikh helmet exemptions. Taylor's framework influenced Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor Commission (2007–2008), co-chaired with sociologist Gérard Bouchard, which examined "reasonable accommodations" for religious minorities and recommended over rigid to foster mutual recognition while upholding shared democratic values. The report's 37 proposals emphasized dialogue to resolve tensions, rejecting both multiculturalism's alleged fragmentation and laïcité's exclusionary tendencies, and advocated education on Quebec's history to build intercultural openness. Critically, Taylor cautions against reductive that entrench victimhood, insisting recognition demands self-critique and reciprocity, as cultures gain authenticity through intersubjective validation rather than isolation. This nuanced stance positions his thought as a bridge between universalist liberalism and particularist demands, prioritizing causal links between cultural affirmation and societal cohesion over procedural indifference.

Engagement with Quebec Nationalism and Democracy

Taylor served as president of the Quebec section of the federal (NDP) and ran as its candidate in four federal elections between 1962 and 1972, including a 1965 contest against in Mount Royal. Throughout these efforts, he promoted social democratic policies while defending against separatist movements, emphasizing between and Quebec's French-speaking majority. In Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (1993), Taylor advocates "deep diversity" within federalism, arguing that Quebec's distinct societal culture—rooted in French language, Catholic heritage, and collective self-determination—requires asymmetrical arrangements, such as enhanced provincial powers or special status, to prevent cultural erosion and foster national unity. He critiques uniform federal models for ignoring these "solitudes," positing that mutual recognition of differences strengthens democratic legitimacy by aligning institutions with citizens' embedded identities rather than imposing procedural neutrality alone. This framework counters sovereignty claims by offering Quebec nationalists a path to self-rule within Canada, avoiding the economic and identity risks of independence. Taylor's 1992 essay "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition" exemplifies as a test case for balancing liberal with , where failure to recognize the province's majority culture as a "distinct society" undermines equal respect and invites reactive . He contends that democracies thrive not through charters detached from but via practices that negotiate identities, warning that reductive proceduralism exacerbates alienation in diverse federations. From 2007 to 2008, Taylor co-chaired the Quebec government's Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences with Gérard Bouchard, addressing tensions over religious and immigrant practices amid rising identity debates. The commission's report, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation, endorses "interculturalism" as Quebec's model—prioritizing integration into a shared civic space while accommodating differences under "open secularism," with state neutrality on religion but heritage symbols like the crucifix retained in the National Assembly. It proposes 37 measures, including ethics education and public consultations, to enhance democratic participation in resolving accommodations, rejecting both rigid laïcité and unchecked multiculturalism as threats to social cohesion. Taylor later opposed 2019's Bill 21, which barred public sector workers from religious symbols, arguing it contravened the commission's principles of inclusive dialogue.

Philosophy of Religion and Secularism

The Secular Age: Conditions of Belief

A Secular Age, published on September 20, 2007, by Harvard University Press, presents Charles Taylor's analysis of how Western modernity has altered the conditions under which religious belief operates. Taylor contends that secularity arises not from the subtraction of religious elements but from the addition of new cultural, moral, and intellectual frameworks over five centuries, transforming a society where faith in God was nearly unchallenged into one where it constitutes merely one viable option among diverse spiritual and secular alternatives. This shift redefines belief as a contested stance, embedded in a pluralistic "social imaginary" where paths to human fullness—deep satisfaction or meaning—can be pursued immanently, without transcendent reference. Taylor delineates three interrelated meanings of secularity that illuminate these conditions: first, the evacuation of religious reference from public spaces and the , enabling scientific in a disenchanted world; second, a decline in overt religious adherence and practice; and third, the novel circumstance where both belief and unbelief function as intellectually and experientially plausible choices for individuals. He traces the historical trajectory from a pre-Reformation era dominated by the "porous self"—an identity permeable to spiritual forces, rituals, and —to the post-Enlightenment "buffered self," insulated by rational , instrumental control, and a mechanistic understanding of that strips away enchanted meanings. Reform movements within both and Catholicism, emphasizing personal discipline and moral reform, inadvertently paved the way for this by prioritizing ordinary life over monastic withdrawal and fostering an ethic of ordinary , which later secular variants repurposed into exclusive . Central to these conditions is the "immanent frame," the dominant modern outlook confining explanations and sources of fullness to the natural, social, and psychological orders, excluding transcendence as unnecessary or illusory. This frame can manifest as "closed," enforcing a buffered invulnerability that dismisses religious experience as subjective or erroneous, or "open," permitting transcendence while operating within immanent constraints; however, the default cultural momentum favors closure, rendering non-obvious. Taylor rejects reductive "subtraction stories" of —which posit and reason eroding —as inadequate, arguing instead that secularity emerges from constructive additions like new disciplines of self-examination, the valorization of ordinary life, and the displacement of embodiment ("") toward inward, disembodied or . Under these conditions, religious endures amid "cross-pressures": believers confront pervasive doubts, the intellectual respectability of , attractions to immanent ideals like self-fulfillment or without , and the need for robust justifications in a skeptical milieu. thus demands ongoing negotiation, often manifesting in "nova" forms—innovative expressions blending tradition with modern sensibilities—rather than unreflective embedding, while unbelief gains traction as the in a fragmented lacking a unifying sacred canopy. Taylor's framework underscores that heightens the fragility of , yet also opens possibilities for deeper authenticity when resists flattening into mere or moralism.

Re-Enchantment and Spiritual Longings

In (2007), Charles Taylor diagnoses the modern condition as one of , characterized by a "buffered " insulated from spiritual forces and cosmic influences, in contrast to the pre-modern "porous " open to transcendent realities. This shift, rooted in the Reformation's emphasis on inward faith and the Scientific Revolution's mechanistic worldview, marginalizes the sacred to subjective experience, fostering an "immanent frame" where meaning is sought within ordinary life without reference to higher powers. Yet Taylor argues that does not eradicate spiritual longings; rather, it generates "cross-pressures," where individuals grapple with competing visions of the good amid proliferating options for and unbelief. Central to these longings is the human pursuit of "fullness," defined as a richer, more worthwhile existence involving connection to something beyond the self—whether through transcendence, depth, or transformative power. Taylor posits this as a universal aspiration, persisting even in , where it manifests as dissatisfaction with flattened, instrumental existence: feelings of , , or mere "" in the absence of higher purpose. In the secular age, such yearnings fuel the "nova effect," an explosion of spiritual seeking in diverse forms—from practices and immanent ecologies to exclusive humanism's moral enthusiasms—revealing the fragility of purely this-worldly fulfillments. Taylor advocates re-enchantment not as nostalgic revival but as a recovery of and , grounded in "strong evaluations" of qualitative goods that orient life toward a of communion or cosmic purpose. Drawing on his Catholic perspective, he highlights religious practices—such as , , and exemplary lives like those of St. Francis—as potent sources for re-embodying the sacred, countering "" (disembodied abstraction) and enabling epiphanic encounters with beauty and the divine. Non-theistic paths, like biophilic cosmologies, may offer partial , but Taylor contends provides robust moral ontology against the "malaise of ," fostering openness to transcendence without reducing it to projection. , , and personal thus serve as avenues to reawaken , affirming the world's inherent meaning.

Cosmic Connections in Contemporary Poetry (2024)

In Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, published on May 21, 2024, by , Charles Taylor examines Romantic and post-Romantic poetry as a mode of resistance to the wrought by 's epistemic shifts, wherein traditional cosmic and moral orders dissolved into fragmented, instrumentalized experience. Taylor argues that these poets innovated language to forge "cosmic connections," evoking a resonant embedding of the human within a meaningful infused with , significance, and inspiration, rather than relying on propositional reasoning. This work extends his prior explorations in The Language Animal (2016), positing poetry's symbolic and musical dimensions as constitutive of human , capable of countering the buffered, atomized self prevalent in secular . The book's structure begins with theoretical chapters outlining disenchantment's historical backdrop—the "epistemic retreat" from enchanted to buffered —and poetry's role in experiential persuasion over abstract argument. Taylor then devotes extended analyses to key figures, including Friedrich Hölderlin's Heimkunft for its temporal reconciliation of human and divine; William Wordsworth's for nature's restorative presence; and for imaginative transcendence; for incarnational rhythms; for existential attunement; Charles Baudelaire's "correspondences" linking senses to eternal forms; Stéphane Mallarmé's essence-distilling aesthetics; and alongside for fragmentary recoveries of order. Each reading highlights poetry's capacity to navigate modernity's "diremption," where human agency clashes with impersonal forces, by cultivating an "interspace" of shared resonance between self and world. Taylor connects these poetic strategies to broader secular conditions, suggesting they address the spiritual longings unfulfilled by exclusive humanism, without reverting to pre-modern ontologies. In a secular age marked by cross-pressures between belief and unbelief, poetry offers a non-dogmatic path to re-enchantment, emphasizing inspiration's ethical pull toward communal embedding over isolated autonomy. The final sections pivot to contemporary implications, underscoring poetry's potential to heal modernity's ills of alienation, though Taylor acknowledges its reasoning remains partial and experiential, demanding reader engagement for full effect. At 640 pages, the volume reflects Taylor's encyclopedic ambition, integrating philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural diagnosis to affirm art's role in sustaining human fullness amid disenchantment.

Reception, Debates, and Criticisms

Key Interlocutors and Influences

Taylor's intellectual formation draws substantially from the German Romantic and idealist traditions, particularly and , whose ideas on , cultural formation, and historical recognition underpin his critiques of atomistic and his emphasis on dialogical self-constitution. Herder's notions of (self-formation through cultural and linguistic embeddedness) and the irreducibility of human expression to mechanistic models inform Taylor's rejection of reductive naturalism in favor of hermeneutic understandings of agency. Hegel's dialectical approach to modernity, ethical life (), and mutual recognition (Anerkennung) similarly shapes Taylor's analyses of social ontology and the pathologies of modern , as evidenced in his interpretive reconstructions of Hegelian themes across works like Hegel's Legacy (1989). Analytic and phenomenological thinkers also exerted key influences, with Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy contributing to Taylor's anti-representationalist views on language as a form of life embedded in shared practices, rather than private mental states. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty informed his phenomenological emphasis on embodied, pre-reflective dimensions of experience, challenging Cartesian dualisms and highlighting the horizons of significance that structure human understanding. These strands converge in Taylor's broader critique of epistemology's formalist turn, privileging instead a retrieval of pre-modern sources of moral intuition, including Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions, while avoiding naive retrievalism. As an interlocutor, Taylor spearheaded communitarian challenges to liberal proceduralism, notably critiquing ' veil of ignorance and neutralist framework for presupposing an unencumbered self detached from communal goods, which he argued undermines the strong evaluations essential to authentic . He shares affinities with fellow communitarians and in stressing narrative unity and the embeddedness of justice in particular traditions, though Taylor's Hegelian distinguishes his position from MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelianism. In and , Taylor engaged in debates over post-secular public reason, defending the epistemic validity of religious contributions against Habermas's translation proviso, while affirming mutual learning between secular and faith-based perspectives in pluralistic democracies.

Achievements, Awards, and Legacy

Taylor received the in 2007, valued at approximately $1.5 million, for advancing understanding of spiritual realities through philosophical inquiry into belief and secularity. In 2008, he was awarded Japan's in Arts and Philosophy, recognizing his advocacy of and grounded in holistic . The John W. Kluge Prize, a $1.5 million award from the for lifetime achievement in the human sciences, was granted to him in 2015, shared with philosopher . In 2016, Taylor became the inaugural recipient of the $1 million Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, honoring his exploration of modernity's moral sources and human fulfillment. These accolades underscore Taylor's enduring contributions to , particularly his critiques of atomistic and analyses of identity, recognition, and in modern societies. His framework of the "social imaginary" has informed debates on how shared understandings shape public life, influencing scholars in political theory and . Taylor's legacy extends to interdisciplinary applications, including in childhood development, where his emphasis on relational authenticity draws from his broader moral . In , his thesis in (2007)—positing not as unbelief's default but as one viable option among cross-pressured faiths—has prompted reevaluations of pluralism and spiritual resilience in liberal democracies. Critics and interlocutors across communitarian, liberal, and theological traditions continue to engage his work, affirming its role in bridging Enlightenment with pre-modern sources of meaning, though debates persist over its implications for and .

Major Criticisms from Liberal, Naturalist, and Postmodern Perspectives

Liberal critics, exemplified by political philosopher Brian Barry, have faulted Taylor's communitarian emphasis on cultural recognition for eroding the impartiality of liberal egalitarianism. In Culture and Equality (2001), Barry contends that Taylor's advocacy for accommodating group-specific differences, as outlined in his 1992 essay "The Politics of Recognition," promotes unequal treatment under the guise of respect, allocating public resources and rights based on collective identities rather than individual merit or need. Barry argues this fragments the polity into competing cultural blocs, contravening the universalist central to Rawlsian , where cultural claims should yield to socioeconomic equalization across all persons irrespective of heritage. Naturalist philosophers challenge Taylor's anti-naturalistic stance, particularly his portrayal of transcendence as indispensable in (2007), asserting that it conflates descriptive with normative advocacy for theistic options. Critics maintain that Taylor's "immanent frame" and doctrine of equivalent "fullness" in religious versus humanistic outlooks overlook naturalistic explanations, which empirically ground intuitions and existential fulfillment in evolved cognitive and social mechanisms without invoking supranatural realities. For instance, naturalists argue Taylor's cross-pressures—tensions between and —do not demonstrate the inadequacy of exclusive but reflect incomplete scientific understanding, rendering his equivalence claim an unsubstantiated apologetic rather than a neutral historical analysis. Postmodern perspectives critique Taylor for insufficiently dismantling modernity's foundational assumptions, despite his diagnoses of its malaise, viewing his reliance on "strong evaluations" and historical teleologies as perpetuating Enlightenment under communitarian guise. Thinkers aligned with postmodern skepticism, such as those influenced by Lyotard, fault Taylor's narrative arcs in (1989)—tracing moral sources from ancient to modern epochs—for constructing meta-narratives of authenticity that impose coherence on irreducibly fragmented discourses, thereby resisting the radical incommensurability of language games. This approach, critics contend, tempers by privileging dialogical horizons over pure , allowing residual to evade the postmodern injunction against totalizing histories.

Major Published Works

Seminal Books and Their Impacts

Hegel (1975) advanced a comprehensive interpretation of Hegel's , emphasizing its to contemporary issues in and by defending Hegel's dialectical method against prevailing dismissals. This work contributed to a resurgence in Hegelian studies, influencing subsequent scholarship on historical agency and recognition in moral theory. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) traces the historical formation of modern notions of the through an examination of key intellectual currents from ancient inwardness to Enlightenment disenchantment and Romantic expressivism. Taylor argues that contemporary identity is constituted by "moral sources" such as the affirmation of ordinary life and the buffered , linking personal authenticity to broader goods like benevolence and nature's voice. The book has shaped debates in by demonstrating how selfhood presupposes evaluative frameworks, impacting fields from to with its narrative reconstruction of modernity's moral imaginary. The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), originally delivered as the , critiques the degeneration of the modern ideal of authenticity into and self-absorption while affirming its roots in a dialogical horizon of significance. Taylor identifies three "malaises" of modernity—, the loss of horizons, and instrumental reason—arguing that authentic requires embeddedness in communal goods and recognition. Its reception highlights Taylor's balanced communitarian response to postmodern , influencing discussions on personal fulfillment amid cultural fragmentation. A Secular Age (2007) challenges the subtraction story of by positing that in 1500 was embedded in an enchanted cosmos, whereas modern emerges from reformist excarnations and the proliferation of exclusive options. Taylor delineates conditions of in a "nova effect" of diverse spiritualities, where faith persists as a minority choice amid immanent frames, fostering cross-pressures on adherents. The work's expansive historical-philosophical scope has profoundly influenced , of , and critiques of , prompting reevaluations of faith's viability in pluralistic societies.

Key Articles, Chapters, and Recent Contributions

Taylor's influential articles, many collected in Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1985), include "What's Wrong with ," which contends that conceptions of limited to the absence of external obstacles fail to address the internal horizons necessary for meaningful . Another key piece, "Social Theory as Practice," critiques reductionist social theories for overlooking the interpretive dimensions of and communal embeddedness. In "The Politics of Recognition" (1992), Taylor argues that modern egalitarian struggles require not just legal equality but mutual recognition of diverse identities to avoid misrecognition's harm to personal authenticity. Among recent contributions, Taylor's article " and the Secular Age" (2020), based on a lecture, examines how Protestant reforms contributed to the disciplinary practices underlying modern secular disenchantment while fostering new forms of spiritual seeking. In a 2021 response to a special issue marking his 90th birthday, Taylor clarifies his positions on , morality, and social imaginaries, engaging critics on themes like the persistence of transcendence amid immanent frames.

References

  1. https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/charles-taylor-awarded-templeton-prize-24358
  2. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/who/Taylor%252C%2520Charles%252C%25201931-
  3. https://www.loc.gov/programs/john-w-kluge-center/kluge-prize/past-winners/item/n84104458/charles-taylor/
  4. https://philosophynow.org/issues/74/Charles_Taylor
  5. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691037790/multiculturalism
  6. http://www.charlestaylor.net/general.htm
  7. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/taylor-charles-1931-charles-margrave-taylor
  8. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society/history/52240/charles-taylor-interviewed
  9. https://www.templetonprize.org/laureate-sub/taylor-press-release/
  10. https://www.mcgill.ca/beatty/digital-archive/past-lectures/charles-taylor
  11. https://www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates/charles_margrave_taylor/
  12. http://www.iwm.at/fellow/charles-taylor
  13. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/profiles/charles-taylor-FBA/
  14. https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/professor-charles-taylor
  15. https://faith.yale.edu/people/charles-taylor
  16. https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/fall2008/feature/taylor.html
  17. https://perspectivesjournal.ca/contributor/charles-taylor/
  18. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/charles-taylor
  19. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0191453718781447
  20. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bouchard-taylor-commission-on-reasonable-accommodation-in-quebec-2007-2008
  21. https://www.archbalt.org/once-lapsed-catholic-insists-spirituality-be-part-of-public-sphere/
  22. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/charles-taylor-queried/
  23. https://thejesuitpost.org/2021/08/charles-taylor-on-the-twin-challenge-of-christians-in-a-secular-age/
  24. https://www.templeton.org/charles-taylor-spiritual-thinking
  25. https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2023/03/21/cbc-column-charles-taylor-244944/
  26. https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/taylorc/
  27. https://contemporarythinkers.org/taylor/introduction/
  28. https://dokumen.pub/the-explanation-of-behaviour-1nbsped-0367705222-9780367705220.html
  29. https://academic.oup.com/book/9949/chapter/157304156
  30. https://philpapers.org/rec/TAYHAA
  31. https://philpapers.org/rec/TAYPPV-5
  32. https://philosophynow.org/issues/125/The_Language_Animal_by_Charles_Taylor
  33. https://philpapers.org/rec/CHODAA
  34. https://iep.utm.edu/soc-sci/
  35. https://voegelinview.com/alasdair-macintyre-charles-taylor-demise-naturalism/
  36. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophical-papers/selfinterpreting-animals/1C9D8283EFC58A29CD798457E356E2C9
  37. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophical-papers/interpretation-and-the-sciences-of-man/7D01DD62259048845EE15C6EDC77049D
  38. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c3972ee4b0632d3480491b/t/56eb3ad537013b8180b9159c/1458256600062/Taylor_InterpretationandtheSciencesofMan.pdf
  39. https://nicksmithphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/taylor_and_the_hermeneutic_tradition.pdf
  40. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophical-papers/AD137DE8003D16E96690293751476CBA
  41. https://www.ijhsss.com/files/6.-Nelson-Kho-KP.pdf
  42. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674824263
  43. https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/philosophy/political-philosophy/sources-self-making-modern-identity
  44. https://scholar.harvard.edu/michaelrosen/files/must_we_return_to_moral_realism.pdf
  45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/202087
  46. https://calhoun.faculty.asu.edu/sites/g/files/litvpz3321/files/publications/articles/calhounmoralityidentityandhistoricalexplanation.pdf
  47. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12258
  48. https://www.religion-online.org/article/inescapable-frameworks-of-meaning/
  49. https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/
  50. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophical-papers/atomism/3D4D3DBF5BC5FF49EB44EAEA17F5B4C4
  51. https://berggruen.org/news/charles-taylor-has-reimagined-identity-and-morality-for-a-secular-age
  52. https://ijhsss.com/files/6.-Nelson-Kho-KP.pdf
  53. https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/bitstreams/d697112c-65bb-4d43-bd64-7cec144d0ab8/download
  54. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249625718_Charles_Taylor%27s_transcendental_arguments_for_liberal_communitarianism
  55. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/13723/1/fulltext.pdf
  56. https://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil389&elps423/lib-com-article.htm
  57. https://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/232_12/taylor-the-politics-of-recognition.pdf
  58. https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1417/Taylor%25252C%252520Politics%252520of%252520Recognition.pdf
  59. https://francis-press.com/uploads/papers/xDsrRp6AE17vEXX7aDxqgsfYeNFM5zn6GBcSyaUH.pdf
  60. https://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil389&elps423/taylor-outline.htm
  61. https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/fall2008/feature/taylor_sidebar/bouchard-taylor.html
  62. https://200.mcgill.ca/history/charles-taylor-bridging-politics-and-philosophy/
  63. https://www.selwyn.ca/news-detail?pk=1280668
  64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt803tp
  65. https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823218677.003.0007
  66. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1993-12-01/reconciling-solitudes-essays-canadian-federalism-and-nationalism
  67. https://dokumen.pub/reconciling-the-solitudes-essays-on-canadian-federalism-and-nationalism-9780773564237.html
  68. https://red.pucp.edu.pe/ridei/wp-content/uploads/biblioteca/buildingthefutureGerardBouchardycharlestaylor.pdf
  69. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674026766
  70. https://archive.timesandseasons.org/2016/03/conditions-of-belief-in-a-secular-age-charles-taylor-round-1/index.html
  71. https://peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/summary-charles-taylors-secular-age-2007/
  72. https://peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/summary-charles-taylors-secular-age-2007
  73. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-secular-age/
  74. https://laisve.lt/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Taylor-Secular-Age.pdf
  75. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/tayloring-christianity
  76. https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1279&context=dissertations_mu
  77. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296084
  78. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/cosmic-connections-poetry-in-the-age-of-disenchantment/
  79. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review
  80. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/52235/charles-taylor
  81. https://harvest.usask.ca/bitstreams/732e04de-d480-482f-b856-69c2740c1e64/download
  82. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.3138/9781442665453-006/html
  83. https://www.nlc-bnc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0001/MQ31213.pdf
  84. https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2732&context=ohlj
  85. https://tif.ssrc.org/2009/11/20/rethinking-secularism-jurgen-habermas-and-charles-taylor-in-conversation/
  86. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848770.2015.1006927
  87. https://www.templetonprize.org/laureate/charles-taylor/
  88. https://reporter.mcgill.ca/charles-taylor-awarded-1-5-million-john-w-kluge-prize/
  89. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/books/canadian-philosopher-wins-1-million-prize.html
  90. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09672559.2021.1999299
  91. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672559.2021.1999299
  92. https://philpapers.org/rec/BARCAE-5
  93. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/do-we-need-a-radical-redefinition-of-secularism-a-critique-of-charles-taylor/36B9D2B2AD1771C4976A404F01FD3261
  94. https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/92/4/590/8030275
  95. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41348825
  96. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/charles-taylor/
  97. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/charles-taylor-books
  98. https://lincolnmullen.com/blog/charles-taylor-and-the-sources-of-the-self/
  99. https://www.enotes.com/topics/sources-self
  100. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/must_we_return_to_moral_realism.pdf
  101. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987692
  102. http://www.markwk.com/book-notes-ethics-of-authenticity.html
  103. https://www.city-journal.org/article/charles-taylor-at-90
  104. https://grahamjosephhill.com/charles-taylor-a-secular-age/
  105. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophical-papers/8FA92D95FEC3E7733097117CF89CAF62
  106. https://news.library.mcgill.ca/charles-taylor-and-expressive-individualism-in-mcgill-university-archives/
  107. https://creor-ejournal.library.mcgill.ca/article/view/29
Add your contribution
Related Hubs
Contribute something
User Avatar
No comments yet.