From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create ways of being, as individuals and as a society. Here, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning, and the shared practice of speech shapes human experience.

In our philosophical tradition and our wider culture, we tend to think of persons as agents. This agential conception is flattering, but in this paper I will argue that it conceals a more complex truth about what persons are. In 1. I set the issues in context. In 2. I critically explore four features commonly presented as fundamental to personhood in versions of the agential conception: action, capability, choice and independence. In 3. I argue that each of these agential features (...) presupposes a non-agential feature: agency presupposes patiency, capability presupposes incapability, choice presupposes necessity and independence presupposes dependency. In 4. I argue that such non-agential features, as well as being implicit within the agential conception, are as apt to be constitutive of personhood as agential features, and in 5. I conclude. (shrink)

The discussion over the befallenness (Widerfahrnis) of experience illustrates how the philosophical tradition has substantially assumed an active and conscious subject. The constitutive meaning of the pre-egoistic and passive, anonymous dimensions of perception and agency become apparent through what befalls us, what we are suffering from, through befallenness, accidentalness and events beyond our control. This article deals with the status of the sovereign subject through a critical discussion of the principles of intentionality and the constitution of world in transcendental subjectivity, (...) showing the development of phenomenology, above all between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as emphasising passivity and anonymity. (shrink)