Kierkegaard’s ideal supports a radical form of “deep diversity,” to use Charles Taylor’s expression. It is radical because it embraces not only irreducible conceptions of the good but also incompatible ones. This is due to its paradoxical nature, which arises from its affirmation of both monism and pluralism, the One and the Many, together. It does so in at least three ways. First, in terms of the structure of the self, Kierkegaard describes his ideal as both unified (the (...) “positive third”) and plural (a “negative unity”). Second, he affirms a process which brings together unity, as implied by the linear notion of “stages”, with plurality, in the form of “spheres of existence” (aesthetic, ethical, and religious). And third, the culmination of the process implies that we should embrace both a unified dialectic (“Religiousness A”) alongside the plural remnants of the ethical/aesthetic, that is, both the infinity of the former and the finitudes of the latter. Unsurprisingly, while Kierkegaard describes those who are able to exemplify his ideal in practice as “always joyful,” he also considers the ideal to be “extremely hard, the hardest task of all.” This is why those such as Hubert L. Dreyfus are wrong to claim that it provides an experience of bliss; on the contrary, those who realize it “are always in danger.” As I shall show, one form this danger takes is that it threatens to dirty the hands of those who manage to uphold Kierkegaard’s ideal. Moreover, it does so in ways that, I claim, tend to be missed by Kierkegaard himself. Nevertheless, the danger is also essential to the creativity of his approach, and I conclude by pointing out how this creativity makes it capable of tackling one of the profoundest challenges in contemporary ethics: that arising from what just war theorists call a “supreme emergency.” . (shrink)

A paradox, it is claimed, is a radical form of contradiction, one that produces gaps in meaning. In order to approach this idea, two senses of “separation” are distinguished: separation by something and separation by nothing. The latter does not refer to nothing in an ordinary sense, however, since in that sense what’s intended is actually less than nothing. Numerous ordinary nothings in philosophy as well as in other fields are surveyed so as to clarify the contrast. Then follows the (...) suggestion that philosophies which one would expect to have room for paradoxes actually tend either to exclude them altogether, or to dull them. There is a clear alternative, however, one that fully recognizes paradoxes and yet also strives to overcome them. (shrink)

Charles Taylor defines `hypergoods' as the fundamental, architechtonic goods that serve as the basis of our moral frameworks. He also believes that, in principle, we can use reason to reconcile the conflicts that hypergoods engender. This belief, however, relies upon a misindentification of hypergoods as goods rather than as works of art, an error which is itself a result of an overly adversarial conception of practical reason. For Taylor fails to distinguish enough between ethical conflicts and those (...) relating to the religio-aesthetic domain. A proper identification of hypergoods as aesthetic, moreover, requires us to revise his accounts of ordinary life, of evil and of the controversy over university curricula. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s ideal supports a radical form of “deep diversity,” to use Charles Taylor’s expression. It is radical because it embraces not only irreducible conceptions of the good but also incompatible ones. This is due to its paradoxical nature, which arises from its affirmation of both monism and pluralism, the One and the Many, together. It does so in at least three ways. First, in terms of the structure of the self, Kierkegaard describes his ideal as both unified (the (...) “positive third”) and plural (a “negative unity”). Second, he affirms a process which brings together unity, as implied by the linear notion of “stages”, with plurality, in the form of “spheres of existence” (aesthetic, ethical, and religious). And third, the culmination of the process implies that we should embrace both a unified dialectic (“Religiousness A”) alongside the plural remnants of the ethical/aesthetic, that is, both the infinity of the former and the finitudes of the latter. Unsurprisingly, while Kierkegaard describes those who are able to exemplify his ideal in practice as “always joyful,” he also considers the ideal to be “extremely hard, the hardest task of all.” This is why those such as Hubert L. Dreyfus are wrong to claim that it provides an experience of bliss; on the contrary, those who realize it “are always in danger.” As I shall show, one form this danger takes is that it threatens to dirty the hands of those who manage to uphold Kierkegaard’s ideal. Moreover, it does so in ways that, I claim, tend to be missed by Kierkegaard himself. Nevertheless, the danger is also essential to the creativity of his approach, and I conclude by pointing out how this creativity makes it capable of tackling one of the profoundest challenges in contemporary ethics: that arising from what just war theorists call a “supreme emergency.”. (shrink)

The ‘liberal-communitarian’ debate arose within anglophone political philosophy during the 1980s. This essay opens with an account of the main outlines of the debate, showing how liberals and communitarians tended to confront each other with opposing interpretations of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1999; originally published in 1971) and Political Liberalism (2005; originally published in 1993). The essay then proceeds to discuss four forms of ‘liberalism after communitarianism’: Michael Freeden’s account of liberalism as an ideology; Joseph Raz and Will Kymlicka’s (...) perfectionist liberalisms; the liberalism of value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams; and Judith N. Shklar’s liberalism of fear. It concludes with the suggestion that there are times when liberals of every kind should set aside their ideology, even if only temporarily, in order to listen to their interlocutors with truly open minds. (shrink)

John Rawls’ gamification of justice leads him – along with many other monist political philosophers, not least Ronald Dworkin – to fail to take politics seriously enough. I begin with why we consider games frivolous and then show how Rawls’ theory of justice is not merely analogous to a game, as he himself seems to claim, but is in fact a kind of game. As such, it is harmful to political practice in two ways: one as regards the citizens who (...) participate directly in it, and the other as regards those who do no more than follow it. Similar harms, I then argue, come from taking politics too seriously, which is the attitude I ascribe to pluralist political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams. To them, the plural, incommensurable nature of values means that they cannot be reconciled and so that politics must be a matter of negotiating dirty, and often tragic, compromises. What we need instead, I conclude, is a third way, one that is neither monist nor pluralist but in-between the two extremes. (shrink)

A short discussion of Charles Taylor's masterwork.

Charles Taylor has written three big books on the self-understandings of modern age andmodern individuals. -/- Hegel -/- (1975) focused on one towering figure, and held that Hegel -/- ’ -/- saspirations to overcome modern dualisms are still ours, but Hegelian philosophicalspeculation is not the way to do it. -/- Sources of the Self -/- (1989) ran the intellectual historyfrom peak to peak, stressing the continuous presence of modern tensions and cross- pressures between Enlightenment and Romanticism. -/- A (...) Secular Age -/- (2007) aims to cover the valleys as well, trying to explain how certain -/- “ -/- secular -/- ” -/- understandings have come toexistence and have managed to spread themselves from the elites into the prevailing taken-for-granted background imaginaries.Taylor begins by distinguishing three senses of secularity. The first can be called -/- “ -/- political -/- ” -/- , focusing on the separation of state and church, while the second one is -/- “ -/- sociological -/- ” -/- , focusing on the statistics of religious belief and practice. The third one can perhaps be called -/- “ -/- existential -/- ” -/- and it seems to be harder to define. It concerns what Taylor calls broad background conditions of belief and spiritual searching: something like thegeneral assumptions implicit in one -/- ’ -/- s lived experience, social and cosmic imaginary, whichmake a difference to what form (if any) one -/- ’ -/- s religious aspirations take. Taylor focuses onthis third sense and asks what has changed in that respect between 1500 when lack of belief in God was unimaginable, and 2000, when belief is one option among many. (shrink)

The Philosophy Now series promises to combine rigorous analysis with authoritative expositions. Ruth Abbey’s book lives up to this demand by being a clear, reliable and more than up-to-date introduction to Charles Taylor ’s philosophy. Although it is an introductory book, the amount of footnotes and references ought to please those who want to study the original texts more closely. Abbey’s book is structured thematically: morality, selfhood, politics and epistemology get 50 pages each. The focus is on the (...) internal coherence of Taylor ’s work, not in its critique of or defence against other positions. The chapters are self-containing, but together they give a good total picture of Taylor ’s position. The concluding chapter is a highly interesting preview of Taylor ’s unpublished work-in-progress on secularity, which according to Abbey is comparable in magnitude to Sources of the Self. (shrink)

In seinem Buch ‚Die Quellen des Selbst’ (1989 / 1996) unternahm Charles Taylor den Versuch, die Geschichte der personalen Identität oder des Selbst in der abendländischen Kultur als das Wechselspiel von Individuum und Gesellschaft auf der Grundlage des jeweils allgemein vorgegebenen moralischen Verhältnisses eines Individuums zum Ganzen darzustellen. Das sog. Selbst ist nach Taylor also im Kern ein moralisch verfasstes Selbst im Sinne eines Menschen, der von sich selbst aufrichtig in seiner jeweiligen Epoche sagen kann: Ich bin (...) ein guter Mensch. Taylors Werk endet freilich in Ratlosigkeit. Er weiß nicht, auf welcher verbindlichen Grundlage der heutige, westlich sozialisierte (und zumindest in Europa mehrheitlich säkular orientierte) Mensch von sich noch sagen könnte, er sei ein guter Mensch oder führe ein gutes Leben. Der vorliegende Aufsatz versucht diese Frage zu beantworten, indem er einige Bedingungen der Möglichkeit moralisch fundierter personaler Identität erkundet, die auch und gerade unter heutigen Bedingungen noch erfüllbar sein könnten. Der Aufsatz wird zunächst den Begriff des Guten bei Taylor genauer zu entschlüsseln versuchen, um dann, auch unter Einbeziehung einiger soziologischer Kategorien, das Rahmenwerk einer sog. ‚dynamischen Identität’ zu skizzieren. (shrink)

In this comprehensive interview with Charles Taylor, the focus is put on the conceptual level. Taylor reflects on the relationship between history, narrativity and social critique, between social imaginaries and social change, and between his own thought and that of Cambridge School history of ideas, Nietzschean genealogy, Frankfurt School critical theory, and agonistic approaches to the political. This interview not only captures the tremendous breadth and range of Taylor’s theoretical interests, it also vindicates his contention that (...) the common thread of his oeuvre is the attempt to work out a non-reductive, non-mechanistic, non-atomistic philosophical anthropology. Still, it offers new insights into Taylor's most recent thinking and his intellectual engagement with the challenges of our time. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to chart what I see as parallels between the ontology of self in Charles Taylor’s work and that of various Buddhist ‘no-self’ views, along with parallels between Taylor’s commitment to reviving republican ideas and some aspects of Buddhist ethics. I see key resemblances and overlaps at the level of metaphysics as well as ethics. For Taylor, the sorts of atomistic accounts of self that have come to be accepted as natural (...) and unquestionable in the West are deeply misguided. The dominant Hobbesian-Lockean procedural picture of selfhood blinds us to the intrinsic relatedness of self to others and has profoundly negative consequences for the kinds of shared conceptions of the good necessary for viable and functioning democracies to survive and flourish. For Taylor, we thus need to retrieve and rearticulate a more accurate understanding of the self (Taylor 1985a, c, d, 1989, 1995a, b, 2003). This conception acknowledges that the self is located in a web of locution, conversation, and social interconnected- ness, a sense that gives rise to an expanded notion of our moral and political duties. I argue that such an understanding of the self and ethics has strong resemblances to the kinds of views of the self and ethics as articulated by various schools of Buddhism. Conceptions of anātman or no-self and pratītya-samutpāda (intercon- nectedness) similarly broaden the scope and domain of our moral concern to be more inclusive by interrogating perspectives that conceive of the self as a separate and isolated individual. This is illustrated by, for example, the Dalai Lama (1999), who argues that a more accurate understanding of the self as empty of inherent and separate existence leads to adopting a more compassionate ethical stance towards others. I would suggest that, along the same lines, this understanding is required for a sustainable future for not only our communities, but that of an increasingly inter-related and inter-dependent world. (shrink)

The as-structure provided by language, even in the sciences, is always constitutive of experience and never merely designative. “From Saying…it comes to pass that the World is made to appear” (Heidegger 1971 [1957]: 101).

Kazakhstan is a unique country in the center of Eurasia with a rich history. It is famous for its cultural diversity and national harmony, in which various ethnic groups coexist in a single society. This phenomenon, known as multiculturalism, is becoming increasingly relevant in the modern world, and Kazakhstan is an example of the successful integration of various cultures.

O debate fomentado nos anos oitenta entre liberais e “comunitaristas” tende a contrastar radicalmente as concepções teóricas de John Rawls e Charles Taylor, sendo o primeiro o representante principal da vertente liberal e o segundo do “comunitarismo”. Ao contrário do que sustenta essa distinção, neste artigo proponho ir para além dela, a fim de defender que há convergências dos autores no que tange à discussão sobre o pluralismo. Em um primeiro momento, apresento os diagnósticos de Rawls e de (...) Taylor quanto ao fato do pluralismo nas sociedades modernas como uma característica contextual irreversível (I). Em um segundo momento, diante da tensão ética insuperável entre divergentes concepções bem, a saída mais viável caminha para a justiça. Para tanto, desenvolvo a concepção de “justiça política” de Rawls em “O Liberalismo Político” e as publicações mais recentes de Charles Taylor como em “Secularism and Freedom of Conscience”, “A Secular Age” e “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism?”, que parecem sustentar certa “virada liberal-rawlsiana” no pensamento do autor (II). Em um terceiro momento, efetuo uma distinção entre o fato do pluralismo (razoável) e o valor do pluralismo, para finalmente concluir o artigo argumentando que tanto Rawls como Taylor tendem a defender o pluralismo como um valor político para as instituições e não como um valor moral abrangente para os indivíduos. (shrink)

My aim is to explore how the notion of personhood is tied to the notion of space--both physical and moral space. In particular, I argue against the Cartesian view of the disengaged/disembodied self and in favour of Charles Taylor's and Martin Heidegger's view of the engaged and embedded self. I contend that space, as the transcendental condition for the possibility of human agency, is the place where questions of identity are possible and answers, if any, are to be (...) found. Thus, personal identity and space are inexorably tied and dependent on one another. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo descrever e comparar as propostas da política de reconhecimento desenvolvidas por Axel Honneth, na obra Luta por reconhecimento, e por Charles Taylor, na obra Argumentos filosóficos. Ambos os pensadores buscam em Hegel uma referência teórica para renovar suas teorias. Em Honneth, a noção de reconhecimento está fortemente ancorada na intersubjetividade dos indivíduos, decorrente de uma luta por reconhecimento: o desrespeito a qualquer uma das formas de reconhecimento pleno – o amor, o direito e (...) a solidariedade – gera demandas sociais de reconhecimento e, consequentemente, a luta pelo mesmo. Em Taylor, o reconhecimento pressupõe uma noção ontológica de bem, prefigurado na linguagem, tradição, valores e costumes. Ambos os autores mantêm um vínculo forte com a ideia hegeliana da intersubjetividade como instância fundamental na formação das identidades, enquanto base coletiva dos movimentos sociais. (shrink)

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s locating of Herder and Rousseau’s “expressivism” in Marx’s understanding of the human as artist, I begin this essay by examining expressivism in Taylor, followed by its counterpart in M. H. Abrams’s work, namely the wind as metaphor in British Romantic poetry. I then further explore this expressivism/wind connection in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Marx’s The German Ideology. Ultimately I conclude that these expressive winds lead to poetic gesture per (...) se, and thereby, to a kind of poetry at the heart of Marx’s philosophy. (shrink)

In Chapter 8 of The Language Animal, Charles Taylor claims that narratives are unsubstitutable for an appropriate understanding of social life and ‘human affairs’ in general. In order to identify open questions in his argumentation as well as unwanted consequences of his outlook, I proceed in three consecutive steps. I first problematize Taylor’s distinction between laws and stories, then go on to address his intentional blurring of stories and histories, and finally suggest that the concept of genealogy (...) might be a promising candidate for describing Taylor’s approach, concluding that he implicitly forms the equation: narrative equals history equals critique. (shrink)

The article intends to analyse the problem of the coexistence of opposite and alternative “comprehensive doc- trines” in today's Western society, on the basis of a comparison between the thought of Schmitt, Böckenförde, Habermas, Rawls and Charles Taylor. In this regard the article proposes a possible solution to avoid, on the one hand, the intolerant goal of a total homogeneity, and on the other a naive and aproblematic acceptance of a relativistic multiculturalism.

This essay explores Bernard Williams’s portrayal of his, Alasdair MacIntyre’s, and Charles Taylor’s views on how to move in relationship to religion in our modern world: backward in it (MacIntyre), forward in it (Taylor), and out of it (Williams). I contend that this portrayal is not entirely accurate in each case, though there is some truth in it, and that looking at each author’s view on the relationship of religion to modernity is instructive for those of us (...) who wish to keep religious faith alive in our modern, secular age. I begin with Williams, and then discuss MacIntyre and Taylor in turn. I seek to show how MacIntyre and Taylor can help us to overcome the challenge to religious faith that Williams presents and how both offer important guidance for the life of faith in our modern, secular age. (shrink)

Retrieving Realism renders the joint philosophical goals of Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor into what is probably their final and most concise form. It has two main objectives: first, it aims to deconstruct the mediationalism that undergirds Western philosophy, and second, it endorses contact theory, or embodied/embedded coping, as an alternative. In this essay, I present the book’s most salient themes and reveal areas that are ripe for further philosophical consideration. I also direct the reader to the work’s (...) genuine ontological challenge: how to come to grips with contact theory beyond the borders of epistemology. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin made the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Since then, prominent contemporary philosophers including Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum have declared negative liberty insufficient or incoherent. This is a critique of those declarations, which have been unduly accepted to a large extent. The critique primarily focuses on Taylor, who made the most direct and complete argument against negative liberty. His argument is shown to be ineffective. And further, his conception of positive liberty is shown (...) to be incoherent. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility that religiously motivated intolerance and conflict can be reframed and positively utilized for constructive social-political purposes. After reviewing efforts by political philosophers over the past two decades to accommodate religious voices in political discourse, I scrutinize Charles Taylor’s attempt to improve upon the limits of “accommodationist” approaches to religious intolerance and conflict. I argue that both accommodationist and Taylor’s recognition-based approaches to religiously motivated conflict take the gravity of such conflict with insufficient (...) seriousness. I then explore the potential goods of intentional conflict by examining Chantal Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism as a proposal for thinking beyond tolerance as an orienting value for resolving intransigent conflict. While I argue that Mouffe’s account finally suffers from certain of the same misgivings as the accommodationist and recognition-based approaches, I conclude that agonistic pluralism’s aim to conceptually reframe (rather than eliminate) intolerance and conflict moves in an important and promising direction. (shrink)

In this article, I explain and defend the concept of multicultural nationhood. Multicultural nationhood accounts for how a nation can have a cohesive identity despite being internally diverse. In Canada, the challenge of nation-building despite the country’s diversity has prompted reflection on how to conceive of the national identity. The two most influential theories of multiculturalism to come from Canada, those of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, emerged through consideration of Canada’s diversity, particularly the place of Québécois, Indigenous (...) peoples, and immigrants in society. I begin by synthesizing Taylor’s and Kymlicka’s theories. I then propose a new subjective definition of nation, wherein the character of a nation is determined by how its members conceive of themselves. Once these concepts are explained, they are combined in an account of multicultural nationhood. Multicultural nationhood involves the cultivation of a national identity wherein various cultural groups are recognized as constitutive of the nation. (shrink)

The first part of this paper develops an outline of the history of hermeneutics organised around the problem of the method, understood as the question of guarantee of objectivity, the central problem of XIX century hermeneutics. In this outline XX century neo-Wittgensteinian philosophers like Peter Winch and Charles Taylor, appears as establishing the legitimacy of the methodological autonomy of hermeneutically oriented approach to social studies. Second part of the paper follows Georgia Warnke suggestion that specific Gadamerian contribution is (...) to refuse objectivity and intersubjective validity as necessary requisites for interpretation to be successful. We find in an analogy with phenomenological analysis of perception of material object and in hermeneutical analysis of the function of “distance” the grounds in Gadamer´s thought that supports this interpretation. We conclude assessing whether Gadamer position implies a methodological conclusion of the kind "everything goes" and which is the role intersubjectivity has to play in Gadamerian new scenery. (shrink)

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts. The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these (...) chapters for developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences. -/- Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research. (shrink)

Abstract: There has been an ongoing dispute between defenders of world disclosure (understood here in a loosely Heideggerian sense) and advocates of normative debate. I will take up a recent confrontation between Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom over this question as my point of departure for showing how world disclosure can expand the range of normative argument. I begin by distinguishing pre-reflective disclosure—the already interpreted, structured world in which we find ourselves—from reflective disclosure—the discrete intervention of a particular (...) utterance or text. I discuss Taylor’s notion of social imaginaries as a way of thematizing our pre-reflective background and Talal Asad’s critique of Taylor to show how this background can be one space of argument. I then develop my own understanding of reflective disclosure, of which Taylor gives an indequate account, developing my argument with help of literature, including a close analysis of Susan Glaspell short story “A Jury of Her Peers.” This story illustrates how world disclosure can make normative arguments without confining itself to Brandom’s or Habermas’s idea of the exchange of reasons. (shrink)

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving (...) from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. (shrink)

Communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel, defend what we may call the ‘social constitution thesis.’ This is the view that participation in society makes us what we are. This claim, however, is ambiguous. In an attempt to shed some light on it and to better understand the impact its truth would have on our beliefs regarding autonomy, I offer four possible ways it could be understood and four corresponding senses of individual independence and autonomy. I (...) also indicate what senses liberals can accept that we are socially constituted and in what sense I take communitarians to argue we are socially constituted. (shrink)

This paper examines Charles Taylor’s claim that personal identity is a matter of strong evaluations. Strong evaluations are in this paper analyzed as stable preferences, which are strongly identified with and which are based on qualitative distinctions concerning the non-instrumental value of options. In discussing the role of strong evaluations in personal identity, the focus is on "self-identity", not on the criteria of personhood or on the logical relation of identity. Two senses of self-identity can be distinguished: identity (...) as practical orientation and identity as self-definition in a more encompassing sense. The former consists of one’s strong evaluations only, the latter is a more comprehensive notion, in which strong evaluations have a double role. Strong evaluations are first of all directly a constituent of self-definitions, and secondly, self-definition with respect to other features proceeds in the light of the strong evaluations. (shrink)

I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material (...) cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional char- acter . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman). (shrink)

A discussion od Charles Taylor's 'Sources of the Self'.

Hannah Arendt is often--but somehow not unfailingly--credited, together with Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, as being one of the central voices in the philosophical turn to the concept of narrative of a generation or more ago. Some have even cited her 1958 The Human Condition as providing a particular impetus for later accounts of narrative. This essay examines what contemporary philosophical accounts of narrative might still owe Arendt, exploring her approach to narrative in theory as well (...) as practice. The first part looks at Arendt's use of philosophical sources from the tradition--Aristotle, Augustine and Hegel--with an eye to how her appropriation of these figures differs from that of contemporary philosophers of narrative. Three of Arendt's typically bold and rich claims about narrative action emerge as important: the notion of action as revealing an agent's own daimon: the condition that such action be revealable within a world or shared public space which has resilience yet vulnerability; and the potential for agents revealed within such a world to discover some form of narrative rebirth in their efforts at storytelling. The second section examines the extent to which Arendt herself allowed those claims to be tested and thought through in her own attempts (in Men in Dark Times, Rahel Varnhagen and elsewhere) at constructing biographical narratives. (shrink)

This article discusses anglophone readings of G. W. F. Hegel against the backdrop of German-language scholarship. The article starts by differentiating types of metaphysics (I). Following a taxonomy introduced by Paul Redding, I then discuss Charles Taylor’s Christian-mystical (II), the so-called »non-metaphysical« (III) and the »revised metaphysical« reading (IV). Terry Pinkard’s work serves as an example of (III) and Stephen Houlgate’s as an example of (IV). I highlight problematic aspects of each reading that concern: the meaning of »reason (...) in the world« (II), the anti-relativist clout of Hegel’s philosophy (III) and the difference between the development of logical concepts and the empirical origin of the world and human thinking (IV). The text ends (V) by pointing to the social implications of each type of reading. (shrink)

Despite providing the basic theoretical framework for Western biology and all related sciences, Darwinism continues to be a controversial perspective when it comes to understanding ourselves as distinctly "human." In this paper, I try to correct a common misinterpretation of Thomas Hobbes' conceptualization of human nature which I think sheds light on some of the significant misunderstandings and sources of objection to Darwinism. I begin by contrasting this common misreading of Hobbes' philosophy of human nature with an alternative reading that (...) suggests a more subtle notion than is often allowed. I then summarize the basic ideas of Darwinism and explain why I think a Darwinian conceptualization of humanity, freed from misinterpretations of Hobbes, need not lead to an agonistic or reductive notion of human nature. Suggestions made by the philosophers Charles Taylor and Howard Gardner about how science and philosophy can help or hinder conceptualizations of personhood are considered insofar as they corroborate this idea. (shrink)

Critics of liberalism have argued that liberal individualismmisdescribes persons in ignoring the degree to which they aredependent on their communities. Indeed, they argue that personsare essentially socially constituted. In this paper, however, Iprovide two arguments – the first concerning communitariandescriptive claims about persons, our society, and the communitarian ideal society, and the second regarding thecommunitarian view of individual autonomy – that the communitariantheory of Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel,relies on individuals either being independent from theircommunities or (...) having a community-independent desire. Thisis indicative of a deep contradiction in communitarian thought. (shrink)

Critics of liberalism in the past two decades have argued that the fact that we are necessarily "situated" or "embedded" means that we can not always choose our own ends (for example, our conceptions of the good or our loyalties to others). Some suggest that we simply discover ourselves with these "connections." If correct, this would argue against (Rawlsian) hypothetical contract models and liberalism more broadly, make true impartiality impossible, and give support to traditionalist views like those of Alasdair MacIntyre, (...) Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. These same critics argue that liberalism's rejection or neglect of this supposed fact of our moral life has pernicious anti-social affects. I argue that the critics are wrong in both cases, defending what I call "strong voluntarism." In contrast both to recent critics of liberalism and the dominant trend in recent liberal thought, my defense of strong voluntarism allows that we can always choose to accept or reject any end we happen to have but that this does not lead to any pernicious anti-social effects. (shrink)

`Due recognition is a vital human need', argues Charles Taylor. In this article I explore this oft-quoted claim from two complementary and equally appealing perspectives. The bottom—up approach is constructed around Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, and the top—down approach is exemplified by T. M. Scanlon's brief remarks about mutual recognition. The former can be summed up in the slogan `wronging by misrecognizing', the latter in the slogan `misrecognizing by wronging'. Together they provide two complementary readings of the (...) claim that due recognition is a vital human need: one starts from needs, shows how we have a multifarious need for adequate recognition and builds up to a view about wronging; the other starts from wronging and discusses the kind of interest or need that we have of standing in relations where wronging is absent. (shrink)

The work argues that engaging Africa's cultural and epistemic resources as social imaginaries, and not as metaphysical or ontological “essences,” could help practitioners of African philosophy overcome the cluster of shortcomings and undesirable features associated with “ethnophilosophy.” A number of points are outlined to buttress this claim. First, the framework of social imaginaries does not operate with the false assumption that Africa's cultural forms and epistemic resources are static and immutable. Second, this framework does not lend itself to sweeping generalizations (...) about Africa or large swathes of it. Third, the framework of social imaginaries remedies ethnophilosophy's problem of collectivism. Fourth, unlike ethnophilosophy, it does not romanticize and canonize a supposedly “idyllic” African past, which militates against a realistic and forward‐looking philosophizing. Finally, with the framework of social imaginaries, Africa's indigenous cultural and epistemic resources become amenable to being engaged with critical philosophical rigor. This not only enhances their potential for cross‐cultural philosophical conversation but also enhances their usefulness for addressing current sociopolitical issues affecting Africa. The discussion in this paper somewhat touches upon the question of method in African philosophy, using the ethnophilosophy problem to navigate the vast gamut of issues involved. (shrink)

This out-of-print collection in the area of the history, politics, ethics, and theory of privacy includes selections from Peter Gay, Alan Westin, Walter Benjamin, Catharine MacKinnon, Seyla Benhabib, Anita Allen, Ann Jennings, Charles Taylor, Richard Sennett, Mark Wicclair, Martha Nussbaum, and Robert Nozick.

What might it mean to say that there is such a thing as a hermeneutic circle in the social sciences? A consideration of some remarks by Charles Taylor and others and an interpretive reconstruction, and assessment, of the idea of such a circle.

From the time of Confucius and Aristotle up until the present day, theorists have argued that the individual self exists only as an aspect of social structures. The claim is not merely that the self is causally affected by social structures; but that the self is just social structure. The most recent iteration of this claim comes in book-length from Brian Lowery, though the argument was made more completely by Charles Taylor and Kenneth Gergen in the preceding decades. (...) The most rigorous version of the argument draws on Wittgenstein, claiming that thought itself is impossible without socially constructed meanings. Wittgenstein argued that a “private language” would be incoherent because the person using the language could not have any criteria by which to judge the correctness of the symbols used. However, this reasoning fails as an argument against individualized thought because it applies equally well to the use of public languages. So this paper argues that eliminative social constructivism has never made any sense, least of all in its latest form. (shrink)

Since the 1980’s, a key issue in political philosophy has been the debate between communitarian philosophers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, and those who support forms of liberal individualism, such as that found in Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In this debate, reference has quite often been made to Aristotle. This is particularly so in the case of Alasdair MacIntyre, who is frequently seen as presenting a neo-Aristotelian view. Nevertheless, it is not clear (...) whether MacIntyre always presents a plausible interpretation of Aristotle’s arguments. What is most important concerns the historical foundations of the concept of the Aristotelian tradition. If, as I argue in this paper, MacIntyre articulates an unhistorical view of what he calls the ‘Aristotelian tradition’, then his is a forced view of methodology that must fail. However, if this ‘embedded’, historicist methodology fails, then MacIntyre’s argument loses its strength. He would have to support it by using rationalistic methodology, since all his historicist methodology is unhistorical, but this would mean using argumentative resources that he does not have, since he has rejected the possibility that philosophical theory must be based on recognised first principles available to us all. (shrink)

This paper explores the incongruence between white South Africans’ pre- and post-apartheid experiences of home and identity, of which a wave of emigration is arguably a result. Among the commonest reasons given for emigrating are crime and affirmative action; however, this paper uncovers a deeper motivation for emigration using Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary and Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling. The skewed social imaginary maintained by apartheid created an unrealistic sense of dwelling for most white South (...) Africans. After 1994, the conditions supporting this imaginary disintegrated. Many white South Africans feel so strong a sense of unease they can no longer dwell in the country. Many try to escape through emigration, but carry unresolved questions of identity and belonging to their new “homes.”. (shrink)