Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order of Canada.
The great merit of Taylor’s brief, non-technical, powerful book…is
the vigour with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later
Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only
individuals in so far as we are social… Being authentic, being
faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was
produced in collaboration with a lot of other people… The core of
Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism
of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because
you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to
respect every human being, and every human culture—no matter how
vicious or stupid.
*London Review of Books*
Charles Taylor is a philosopher of broad reach and many talents,
but his most striking talent is a gift for interpreting different
traditions, cultures and philosophies to one another… [This book
is] full of good things.
*New York Times Book Review*
Taylor’s crystalline insights rescue us from the plague on both
houses in the debate over modernity and its discontents.
*Chicago Tribune*
Reading Taylor’s unexpected but always perceptive judgments on
modernity, one becomes forcefully aware of the critical potential
of that old philosophical injunction ‘know thyself’. This little
book points to the importance of public reflection and debate about
who we are. It also forcefully draws attention to their absence
from our public culture.
*The Guardian*
Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity is a concise, clear
discussion reexamining these and closely related ‘malaises’ of
modernity while focusing on meaning, its importance in our lives,
and why our attempts to find our identities matter—whether these
identities be personal, social, political, aesthetic, or
scientific. He affirms the moral ground underlying modern
individualism, but challenges us to go beyond relativism to
pluralism.
*Ethics, Place and Environment*
These lectures provide not only an inviting summary of [Taylor’s]
recent thought but also, in many ways, a more revealing statement
of his underlying convictions. Taylor’s own voice comes through
clearly in this book—the voice of a philosophically reflective and
hermeneutically rooted cultural critic.
*Philosophy and Social Criticism*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
