CHARLES TAYLOR (b. 1931) is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist from Montreal, Quebec, best known for his wide-ranging contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and intellectual history.  A pupil of Isaiah Berlin at Oxford, Taylor taught at McGill University from 1961 to 1997, and is now a professor emeritus.

Taylor’s first major work, HEGEL (1975), was a large study of the 19th-century German philosopher that emphasized the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy continues to be relevant to contemporary political and social theory.  SOURCES OF THE SELF (1989), which achieved a wide general readership, explored the multiplicity of the self, or the human subject, in the modern Western world.

In his later work Taylor became more overt about the ways in which being a practicing Roman Catholic shaped his intellectual agenda and approach.  Some hints about his religious views were dropped at the end of SOURCES OF THE SELF, but after the publication of that work his remarks on this topic became more frequent and more explicit.  Taylor, for example, injected himself into 21st-century debates about the role of religion in modern Western societies with his massive work A SECULAR AGE (2007), which tracked some of the major changes in Christian belief in Western societies during the last five centuries.  Despite the shifts in religion's content and its social location over time, Taylor seems to suggest that humans necessarily have some orientation toward what he calls "transcendence" -- some yearning for meaning that goes above and beyond the merely human.


The following books are in PDF format:

* A CATHOLIC MODERNITY?: Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture (Oxford University Press, 1999).  Edited by James L. Heft; with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.

* THE ETHICS OF AUTHENTICITY (Harvard University Press, 1992).

* HEGEL (Cambridge University Press, 1975).

* HEGEL AND MODERN SOCIETY (Cambridge University Press, 1979).

* HUMAN AGENCY AND LANGUAGE: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

* MODERN SOCIAL IMAGINARIES (Duke University Press, 2004).

* MULTICULTURALISM: Examining The Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1994).  Edited and Introduced by Amy Gutmann, with contributions by K. Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer and Susan Wolf.

* PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS (Harvard University Press, 1995).

* PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

* A SECULAR AGE (Harvard University Press, 2007)

* SECULARISM AND FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE [with Jocelyn Maclure] (Harvard University Press, 2011).  Translated by Jane Marie Todd.

* SOURCES OF THE SELF: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989).

* VARIETIES OF RELIGION TODAY: William James Revisited (Harvard University Press, 2002).

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