Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher who taught for most of his career at McGill University in Montreal and also held the Chichele chair at Oxford. He draws on Hegel and on the hermeneutic tradition to argue that human beings are self-interpreting animals whose identities are shaped by language, community and ideas of the good. Sources of the Self traces how the modern sense of self was formed, and A Secular Age asks how belief in God became one option among many in the modern West.

Key ideas

• Human beings are self-interpreting animals: who we are depends partly on how we understand ourselves.
• Our identities rest on 'strong evaluations', judgements about which goods are higher or more worthy.
• Modern identity grew from inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life and the idea of nature as an inner source.
• People and groups need recognition, and misrecognition can do real harm.
• Secularity is not simply the loss of religion but a new condition in which belief is one option among others, within an 'immanent frame'.

Major works

• Sources of the Self (1989)
• A Secular Age (2007)
• Hegel (1975)
• The Ethics of Authenticity (1991)
• Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" (1992)
• The Language Animal (2016)

In the Book corner

• Sources of the Self 1989 · Advanced
  A long history of the modern Western sense of self, subtitled The Making of the Modern Identity. Part I argues that selfhood…
• A Secular Age 2007 · Advanced
  A very long study, growing out of Taylor's Gifford Lectures of 1999, of what it means to live in a secular age.…

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