Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Charles Taylor - Biography

 
Photograph: Charles Taylor


CHARLES TAYLOR - BIOGRAPHY





Duke University's Department of Political Science hosted philosopher Charles Taylor at its Political Theory ...
Dec 18, 2014 · Uploaded by John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University
Charles Taylor's 1989 book "Sources of the Self" is about 500 pages long, drawing on history, philosophy ...
Nov 23, 2016 · Uploaded by Berggruen Institute
19 November 2008: The philosopher Charles Taylor, winner of both the Templeton Prize and the Kyoto Prize ...
Sep 24, 2014 · Uploaded by SOFHeyman
The keynote speech by Charles Taylor is part of the conference 'The ... he received the 2007 Templeton ...
May 17, 2018 · Uploaded by IWMVienna
Charles Taylor, philosophe et ancien coprésident de la commission Bouchard-Taylor. ... 0:00 / 1:42 ... The Self ...
Apr 20, 2018 · Uploaded by Le Devoir
Templeton Prize 2007, Gifford Lectures 1998-99 and 2009British Academy, 1 June 2012.
Jun 16, 2012 · Uploaded by Templeton Prize


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Charles Taylor (philosopher)

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Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor (2019).jpg
Taylor in 2019
Born
Charles Margrave Taylor

November 5, 1931 (age 89)
MontrealQuebec, Canada
Alma mater
Notable work
Spouse(s)
  • Alba Romer Taylor
    (m. 1956; died 1990)
    [1][2]
  • Aube Billard
     
    (m. 1995)
    [3]
Awards
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
Institutions
ThesisExplanation in Social Science (1961)
Doctoral advisorSir Isaiah Berlin
Doctoral students
Other notable students
Main interests
Notable ideas
Influences
Influenced

Charles Margrave Taylor
 CC GOQ FRSC FBA (born 1931) 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, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. His work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.


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 has also made contributions to moral philosophyepistemologyhermeneuticsaesthetics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of action.[48][49]

Biography

Charles Margrave Taylor was born in MontrealQuebec, on November 5, 1931, to a Roman Catholic Francophone mother and a Protestant Anglophone father by whom he was raised bilingually.[50][51] His father, Walter Margrave Taylor, was a steel magnate originally from Toronto while his mother, Simone Marguerite Beaubien, was a dressmaker.[52] His sister was Gretta Chambers.[53] He attended Selwyn House School from 1939 to 1946,[54][55] followed by Trinity College School from 1946 to 1949,[56] and began his undergraduate education at McGill University where he received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in history in 1952.[57] He continued his studies at the University of Oxford, first as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, receiving a BA degree with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics in 1955, and then as a postgraduate student, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1961[2][58] under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin.[59] As an undergraduate student, he started one of the first campaigns to ban thermonuclear weapons in the United Kingdom in 1956,[60] serving as the first president of the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[61]

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.[62]

For many years, both before and after Oxford, he was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, where he is now professor emeritus.[58][failed verification] Taylor was also a Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University in EvanstonIllinois, 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.[63] 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. In 2003, he was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's Gold Medal for Achievement in Research, which had been the council's highest honour.[64][65] He was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities, which included 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.[66]

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.[67] 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.[68] In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural $1-million Berggruen Prize for being "a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity".[69]

Views

Despite his extensive and diverse philosophical oeuvre,[70] Taylor famously calls himself a "monomaniac",[71] concerned with only one fundamental aspiration: to develop a convincing philosophical anthropology.

In order to understand Taylor's views, it is helpful to understand his philosophical background, especially his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelLudwig WittgensteinMartin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Taylor rejects naturalism and formalist epistemology. He is part of an influential intellectual tradition of Canadian idealism that includes John WatsonPaxton YoungC. B. Macpherson, and George Grant.[72][dubious ]

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.[73]

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.[73]

Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg GadamerMichael 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.[73]

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".[74] 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[75] that was highly influential at mid-century.

From there, Taylor also spread his critique to other disciplines. The 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 EastonRobert DahlGabriel Almond, and Sydney Verba.[76] 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.[77]

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,[78] while in Sources of the Self (1989) 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

Taylor in 2012

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 modern hermeneutics and phenomenology.[79]

The hermeneutic tradition develops a view of human understanding and cognition as centred on the decipherment of meanings (as opposed to, say, foundational theories of brute verification or an apodictic rationalism). Taylor's own philosophical outlook can broadly and fairly be characterized as hermeneutic and has been called engaged hermeneutics.[11] 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.[80] It is also evident in his own original contributions to hermeneutic and interpretive theory.[80]

Communitarian critique of liberalism

Taylor (as well as Alasdair MacIntyreMichael Walzer, and Michael Sandel) 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".[81]

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.[82] In rough form, the secularization thesis holds that as modernity (a bundle of phenomena including science, technology, and rational forms of authority) 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.[83] 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 (NDP) 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 ministerPierre Trudeau. This campaign garnered national attention. Taylor's fourth and final attempt to enter the House of Commons of Canada 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.[84] 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.

Taylor served as a vice president of the federal NDP (beginning c. 1965)[61] and was president of its Quebec section.[85]

In 2010, Taylor said multiculturalism was a work in progress that faced challenges. He identified tackling Islamophobia in Canada as the next challenge.[86]

In his 2020 book Reconstructing Democracy he, together with Patrizia Nanz and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor, uses local examples to describe how democracies in transformations might be revitalized by involving citizenship.[87]

Interlocutors

Published works

Books

  • The Explanation of Behaviour. Routledge Kegan Paul. 1964.
  • The Pattern of Politics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1970.
  • Erklärung und Interpretation in den Wissenschaften vom Menschen (in German). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1975.
  • Hegel. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1975.
  • Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1979.
  • Social Theory as Practice. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1983.[a]
  • Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers. 1. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1985.
  • Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers. 2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1985.
  • Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1989.
  • The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press. 1991.[b]
  • The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press. 1991.
  • Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition". Edited by Gutmann, Amy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1992.[c]
  • Rapprocher les solitudes: écrits sur le fédéralisme et le nationalisme au Canada [Reconciling the Solitudes: Writings on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism] (in French). Edited by Laforest, Guy. Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval. 1992.
    • English translation: Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Edited by Laforest, Guy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1993.
  • Road to Democracy: Human Rights and Human Development in Thailand. With Muntarbhorn, Vitit. Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. 1994.
  • Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1995.
  • Identitet, Frihet och Gemenskap: Politisk-Filosofiska Texter (in Swedish). Edited by Grimen, Harald. Gothenburg, Sweden: Daidalos. 1995.
  • De politieke Cultuur van de Moderniteit (in Dutch). The Hague, Netherlands: Kok Agora. 1996.
  • La liberté des modernes (in French). Translated by de Lara, Philippe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1997.
  • A Catholic Modernity? Edited by Heft, James L. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999.
  • Prizivanje gradjanskog drustva [Invoking Civil Society] (in Serbo-Croatian). Edited by Savic, Obrad.
  • Wieviel Gemeinschaft braucht die Demokratie? Aufsätze zur politische Philosophie (in German). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2002.
  • Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2002.
  • Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2004.
  • A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2007.
  • Laïcité et liberté de conscience (in French). With Maclure, Jocelyn. Montreal: Boréal. 2010.
    • English translation: Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. With Maclure, Jocelyn. Translated by Todd, Jane Marie. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2011.
  • Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2011.
  • Church and People: Disjunctions in a Secular Age. Edited with Casanova, JoséMcLean, George F. Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. 2012.
  • Democracia Republicana / Republican Democracy. Edited by Cristi, Renato; Tranjan, J. Ricardo. Santiago: LOM Ediciones. 2012.
  • Boundaries of Toleration. Edited with Stepan, Alfred C. New York: Columbia University Press. 2014.
  • Incanto e Disincanto. Secolarità e Laicità in Occidente (in Italian). Edited and translated by Costa, Paolo. Bologna, Italy: EDB. 2014.
  • La Democrazia e i Suoi Dilemmi (in Italian). Edited and translated by Costa, Paolo. Parma, Italy: Diabasis. 2014.
  • Les avenues de la foi : Entretiens avec Jonathan Guilbault (in French). Montreal: Novalis. 2015.
    • English translation: Avenues of Faith: Conversations with Jonathan Guilbault. Translated by Shalter, Yanette. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. 2020.
  • Retrieving Realism. With Dreyfus, Hubert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2015.
  • The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016.
  • Reconstructing Democracy. How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up. With Nanz, Patrizia; Beaubien Taylor, Madeleine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2020

Book chapters (selected)

See also