Charles Margrave Taylor, CC GOQ FRSC is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal,
Quebec and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his
contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science,
history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the
prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in
addition to widespread esteem among philosophers.
In 2007, Taylor served with Gérard Bouchard on the Bouchard-Taylor
Commission on Reasonable accommodation with regard to cultural differences in
the province of Quebec. He is a practising Roman Catholic.
Career Taylor attended Selwyn House School from
1941 to 1946 and began his undergraduate education at McGill University. He
continued his studies at the University of Oxford, first as a Rhodes Scholar at
Balliol College in 1955, and then as a post-graduate, under the supervision of
Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe. He succeeded John Plamenatz as Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and became a
Fellow of All Souls College. For many years, both before and after Oxford, he
was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University in
Montreal, Canada, where he is now professor emeritus. Taylor was also a
Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University in
Evanston for several years after his retirement from McGill.
Taylor was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1986. In 1991, Taylor was appointed to the Conseil de la
langue française in the province of Quebec, at which point he critiqued
Quebec's commercial sign laws. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of
Canada. In 2000, he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec.
He was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize for progress towards research or
discoveries about spiritual realities, which includes a cash award of US$1.5
million. In 2007 he and Gérard Bouchard were appointed to head a one-year
Commission of Inquiry into what would constitute "reasonable accommodation"
for minority cultures in his home province of Quebec, Canada. In June 2008
he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category. The Kyoto
Prize is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Nobel. In 2015 he was awarded
the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a prize he
shared with philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Views
In order to understand Taylor's views it is helpful to understand his
philosophical background, especially his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Taylor rejects naturalism and formalist epistemologies. He is part of an
influential intellectual tradition of Canadian Idealism that includes John
Watson, Paxton Young, C.B. Macpherson, and George Parkin Grant.
In his essay "To Follow a Rule", Taylor explores why people can fail to follow
rules, and what kind of knowledge it is that allows a person to successfully
follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition
presupposes that to follow directions we must know a set of propositions and
premises about how to follow directions. Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's
solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background.
This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls
"forms of life". More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical
Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the
interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our
bodies in the form of habits, dispositions, and tendencies.
Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Polanyi, and
Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our
understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only
against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On
occasion we do follow rules by explicitly representing them to
ourselves, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of
their own application: application requires that we draw on an
unarticulated understanding or "sense of things"—the background.
Taylor's critique of naturalism Taylor defines naturalism as a family of
various, often quite diverse theories that all hold "the ambition to model the
study of man on the natural sciences." Philosophically naturalism was largely
popularized and defended by the unity of science movement that was advanced by
logical positivist philosophy. In many ways, Taylor's early philosophy springs
from a critical reaction against the logical positivism and naturalism that
was ascendant in Oxford while he was a student.
Initially, much of Taylor's philosophical work consisted of careful
conceptual critiques of various naturalist research programs. This began
with his 1964 dissertation The Explanation of Behaviour, which was a
detailed and systematic criticism of the behaviourist psychology of B. F. Skinner
that was highly influential at mid-century.
From there, Taylor also spread his critique to other disciplines. The still
hugely influential essay "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man" was published
in 1972 as a critique of the political science of the behavioural revolution
advanced by giants of the field like David Easton, Robert Dahl, Gabriel
Almond, and Sydney Verba. In an essay entitled "The Signiﬁcance of
Signiﬁcance: The Case for Cognitive Psychology", Taylor criticized the
naturalism he saw distorting the major research program that had replaced B. F.
Skinner's behaviourism. But Taylor also detected naturalism in
fields where it was not immediately apparent. For example, in 1978's
"Language and Human Nature", he found naturalist distortions in various modern
"designative" theories of language, while in Sources of the Self he found
both naturalist error and the deep moral, motivational sources for this
outlook in various individualist and utilitarian conceptions of selfhood.
Taylor and hermeneutics Concurrent to Taylor's critique of
naturalism was his development of an alternative. Indeed, Taylor's mature
philosophy begins when as a doctoral student at Oxford he turned away,
disappointed, from analytic philosophy in search of other philosophical
resources which he found in French and German hermeneutics and phenomenology.
The hermeneutic tradition develops a view of human understanding and
cognition as centred on the decipherment of meanings. Taylor's own philosophical
outlook can broadly and fairly be characterized as hermeneutic. This is
clear in his championing of the works of major figures within the hermeneutic
tradition such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and Gadamer.
It is also evident in his own original contributions to hermeneutic and
interpretive theory. Communitarian critique of liberalism
Taylor is associated with a communitarian critique of liberal
theory's understanding of the "self". Communitarians emphasize the importance
of social institutions in the development of individual meaning and
identity. In his 1991 Massey Lecture "The Malaise
of Modernity", Taylor argued that political theorists—from John Locke and
Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin—have neglected the way in which
individuals arise within the context supplied by societies. A more realistic
understanding of the "self" recognizes the social background against which life
choices gain importance and meaning. Philosophy and sociology of religion
Taylor's later work has turned to the philosophy of religion, as evident in
several pieces, including the lecture "A Catholic Modernity" and the short
monograph "Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited".
Taylor's most significant contribution in this field to date is his book A
Secular Age which argues against the secularization thesis of Max Weber,
Steve Bruce, and others. In rough form, the secularization thesis holds that as
modernity progresses, religion gradually diminishes in influence. Taylor begins
from the fact that the modern world has not seen the disappearance of religion
but rather its diversification and in many places its growth. He then develops
a complex alternative notion of what secularization actually means given that
the secularization thesis has not been borne out. In the process, Taylor also
greatly deepens his account of moral, political, and spiritual modernity that
he had begun in Sources of the Self. Politics
Taylor was a candidate for the social democratic New Democratic Party in Mount
Royal on three occasions in the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 federal election
when he came in third behind Liberal Alan MacNaughton. He improved his
standing in 1963, coming in second. Most famously, he also lost in the 1965
election to newcomer and future prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. This campaign
garnered national attention. Taylor's fourth and final attempt to enter the
Canadian House of Commons was in the 1968 federal election, when he came in
second as an NDP candidate in the riding of Dollard. In 1994 he coedited a paper
on human rights with Vitit Muntarbhorn in Thailand. In 2008, he endorsed the
NDP candidate in Westmount—Ville-Marie, Anne Lagacé Dowson. He was also a
professor to Canadian politician and former leader of the New Democratic
Party Jack Layton. In 2010, Taylor said multiculturalism
was a work in progress that faced challenges. He identified tackling
Islamophobia in Canada as the next challenge.
Interlocutors Selected books by Taylor
1964. The Explanation of Behaviour. Routledge Kegan Paul.
1975. Hegel. Cambridge University Press. 1979. Hegel and Modern Society.
Cambridge University Press. 1985. Philosophical Papers.
1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Harvard University
Press 1992. The Malaise of Modernity, being
the published version of Taylor's Massey Lectures. Reprinted in the U.S. as The
Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press
1993. Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism.
McGill-Queen's University Press 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining The
Politics of Recognition. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Harvard
University Press 1999. A Catholic Modernity?.
2002. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Harvard
University Press 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke
University Press. 2007. A Secular Age. Harvard University
Press 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected
Essays. Harvard University Press. 2015. With Hubert Dreyfus, Retrieving
Realism. Harvard University Press. See also
List of people from Montreal Notes
Further reading Books
2011 Meynell, Robert Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B.
Macpherson, George Grant and Charles Taylor. Montreal-Kingston:
McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002 Redhead, Mark. Charles Taylor:
Thinking and Living Deep Diversity. Rowman & Littlefield
1995 Tully, James and Daniel M. Weinstock, eds., Philosophy in an Age of
Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Selected peer-reviewed articles
2013 Temelini, Michael. "Dialogical Approaches to Struggles Over Recognition
and Distribution" Critical Review of International Social and Political
Philosophy pp. 2–25. Available: http:dx.doi.org13698230.2013.763517
2005 Émile Perreau-Saussine, Une spiritualité démocratique? Alasdair
MacIntyre et Charles Taylor en conversation, Revue Française de Science
Politique, Vol. 55 No. 2, pp. 299–315 [1]
1991 Skinner, Quentin. "Who Are 'We'? Ambiguities of the Modern Self",
Inquiry, vol. 34, pp. 133–53. External links
A wide-ranging interview with Charles Taylor, including Taylor's thoughts
about his own intellectual development. An Interview with Charles Taylor Part
1,Part 2 and Part 3 The Immanent Frame a blog with posts by
Taylor, Robert Bellah, and others concerning Taylor's book A Secular Age
Text of Taylor's essay "Overcoming Epistemology"
Bibliography of Taylor's works and works on Taylor's philosophy
Links to secondary sources, reviews of Taylor's works, reading notes
Lecture notes to Charles Taylor's talk on Religion and Violence Nov 2004
Lecture notes to Charles Taylor's talk on 'An End to Mediational Epistemology',
Nov 2004 Study guide to Philosophical Arguments
and Philosophical Papers 2 Templeton Prize announcement
Short essay by Dene Baker, philosophers.co.uk
Taylor's famous essay the The Politics of Recognition
Charles Taylor on McGill Yearbook when he graduated in 1952
Online videos of Charles Taylor Can Human Action Be Explained?; Charles
Taylor gives a lecture at Columbia University
A Political Ethic of Solidarity on YouTube; Charles Taylor gives a lecture
on a future politics self-consciously based on differing views and foundations
in Milan "Spiritual Forgetting" on YouTube;
Charles Taylor at awarding of Templeton Prize
(French) «La religion dans la Cité des modernes : un divorce sans issue?» ;
Charles Taylor and Pierre Manent, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, «Les grandes
conférences Argument».