Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor (b. 1931, Montreal) is a Canadian philosopher educated at McGill and Oxford (D.Phil. 1961, supervised by Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe), long associated with McGill University and Northwestern. His early work engaged behaviorist psychology (The Explanation of Behaviour, 1964) and Hegel (Hegel, 1975), developing an interpretive, hermeneutic conception of the human sciences indebted to Herder, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. In Sources of the Self (1989) he traced the moral ontology of modern identity, arguing that ostensibly secular ideals retain inarticulate theistic and Romantic-expressivist sources. A Secular Age (2007) is his major contribution to the question of God: rather than narrating secularization as subtraction, Taylor offers a genealogy of how Western modernity moved from a condition in which belief in God was unproblematic to one in which it is one option among others within an 'immanent frame,' marked by 'cross-pressure' and the felt possibility of 'fullness' from immanent or transcendent sources. A practicing Catholic, he defends the rationality of religious belief while criticizing exclusive humanism and triumphalist religion alike. He has been criticized by Hans Joas and Peter Gordon for selective historical narration, by analytic secularists (Philip Kitcher, Akeel Bilgrami) for residual apologetics, and by Talal Asad for Eurocentric framing of secularity. Taylor won the Templeton (2007), Kyoto (2008), and Berggruen (2016) Prizes.