Charles Taylor

CHARLES TAYLOR

                                        First of all who is Charles Taylor? Well let me tell you some information about him. Charles Margrave Taylor (born November 5, 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,history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggren Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. As we can tell he achieved so many prize because of his passion in philosophy. The prize has been given to Charles Taylor, an exceptional thinker whose work can be of value both personally and in public life. In his native Canada, Taylor was a founder of the New Democratic Party, shaped debates and policy on immigration and ethnic politics, and played an important role in keeping Quebec part of Canada but with special status recognizing its distinctive culture. Taylor is of global influence as a Catholic thinker, a leader on the social democratic left and a spokesperson for combining rather than opposing liberalism and defense of community. His publications will reward readers with very different interests from personal identity to the challenges of modern democracy to religion in a secular age. It points to some good places to start engaging with one of our era’s greatest thinkers. Perhaps most notably, in connection to the Berggren Prize, Taylor has helped reshape debates on what it is to be human and how culture and politics matter in human existence. 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 biological 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 Behavior", which was a detailed and systematic criticism of the behaviorist 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 behavioral 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 behaviorism. 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 (1989) he found both naturalist error and the deep moral, motivational sources for this outlook in various individualist and utilitarian conceptions of selfhood. Taylor’s “Sources of the Self” traces the development of this modern understanding of what it means to be a person and explores its positive contributions and possibilities as well as its limits and potential weaknesses.

Charles Taylor also published so many books about his philosophy. In total, he published 16 books.

These are some of the books he published:

• 2002 Varieties of  Religion Today: William James Revisited
• 2004 Modern Social Imaginaries 
• 2007 A Secular Age
• 2011 Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays
• 2015 With Hubert Dreyfus, Retrieving Realism
• 2016 The Language Animal: The Full Shape of th Human Linguistic Capacity

                                 Language was a crucial medium for this expression, along with art,religious,action and ethical relationships. Humanity expressed itself differently in different cultures and even person. This diversity was not determined by a fixed human nature. It was made available by the natural capacities of human beings. Working put its implications is a basic task for human beings, both at the level of cultural differences and in individual life. "Sources" is an intellectual history, but with broader intent. All of Taylor's major books embeded arguments in histories because he wants to show human beings as a process of becoming, not simply determined by nature. We face new circumstances and also face recurrent dillemas, enriched by a growing range of intellectual and moral resources. Through tracing how modern thinking about the self-developed, Taylor demonstrates both how powerfully ideas can shape our lives and that there are always multiple possibilities for how they can be put to use.

                                               As I understand about his philosophy is that he is trying to tell us that we people have different opinions about life. Person by person is different. No one is the same. Basically all he was trying to say is we are all unique in our own ways, we just have to embrace and love ourselves.