CHARLES TAYLOR: LIFE AND HISTORY
1.1 Introduction
Charles Taylor is one of the best known, leading and well respected philosophers of today.[1] He has contributed to a wide range of fields which include ontology, epistemology, morality, philosophical-anthropology, hermeneutics, philosophy of language and socio-political-theory.[2] Richard Rorty (1931-2007) numbers Charles Taylor “among the dozen most important philosophers writings today.”[3] And Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) observes thus:
He is a man of acute intelligence, total intellectual and moral sincerity, unswerving integrity, and a remarkable insight into a variety of philosophical traditions, their central animating ideas, uncluttered by ingenious and sometimes highly complicated means of defense against actual or possible objects… Taylor is a noble, gifted and deeply interesting thinker, every one of whose works has stimulated and excited me, as it has many other readers.[4]
To better understand him and his philosophical theory, let us first situate him in culture and history. We will then look at his life and emergence of philosophy as well as his projects, style of writings and works. We will then move to analyze his intellectual heritage wherein which we will deal with various philosophers who have had influence on his life.
1.2 Historical and Cultural Background
Canada, Taylor’s native country consists of two fragmented societies: they are Francophones (French-speaking Catholics) and Anglophones (English-speaking Protestants). Each of these societies has its own values, traditions and languages. Robert C. Sibley says, “Canadians’ historical preoccupation has been with catering to differences, not similarities.”[5] They try to build up a state rather than a nation. They share the transatlantic traditions. Canadian society is not based on individual freedom like Americans, rather on peace, order and good government.[6] In Canada, there is a struggle to build up a nation in the face of geographic difficulties, to drive out the external powers, such as Britain and United States and there is tension among culturally diverse population.[7] Taylor notes that the stumbling block of Canada is its failure of French and English-speaking Canadians to understand and respect each other’s motives.[8]
Quebec, the birth province of Taylor, is the East Central Province of Canada. Quebec is Canada's largest province by area and its second-largest administrative division. Majority of its people are French-Speaking.[9] But still, they are threatened by inclusion of their culture into a larger culture, i.e., Anglophone. They are fighting to protect their culture.[10] The common concern of the Quebecers is to preserve their language and culture. They believe that language defines their community.[11]
Montreal, the home town of Taylor, is the second largest city in Canada and the largest city in the province of Quebec. Most spoken language at home is French. Official language of the city is also French. Of its population 56.9% speak French and 12.8% speak English.[12] It is the second largest French-speaking city in the world after Paris.[13]
1.3 Life and Emergence of Philosophy
Charles Taylor was born on 5th November 1931 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He belongs to the twelfth generation of the Quebecois. His father is from English-speaking society and mother is from French-speaking society. “I am half-Francophone, half-Anglophone,” says Taylor.[14] His father is Walter Margrave Taylor and mother is Simone Beaubien. He is the youngest of their three children.[15] Except two years of his childhood, in which he attended a boarding school in Ontario, he spent most of his childhood in Montreal.[16] He married Alba Romer, an artist and a social worker in 1956. The couple had five children. Romer died in 1990. Taylor remarried in 1995, a historian Aube Billard.[17]
In 1952, he received his degree in B.A. History with first class honours from McGill University, Montreal. He did his second bachelors degree in politics and philosophy, and economic, at Balliol College (one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford) and Oxford. Again with first class honours, he graduated in both in 1955. He received his M.A. in 1960 and Ph.D. in philosophy in 1961, from Oxford, as a student of All Souls College.[18] In 1961, he returned to Canada and took the appointment as the professor of the departments of philosophy and political science. He went back to Oxford in the year 1976 to take the chichele professorship[19] of social and political theory. However, once again he returned to Montreal in 1981.[20]
Apart from this, he was also a visiting professor for the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the New School of Social Research in New York. He retired from McGill in the year 1998, but remained as an emeritus professor in the department of philosophy. From 2002, he is in the faculty of philosophy at Northwestern University in Eastern Chicago. Here, he also has joint appointments at the Law School and the Weinberg College of Arts and Science and is also a member of the board of trustees professor.[21] Taylor has received various awards for his brilliant intellectual contributions. In January 1996, the members of the Society of Mary known as Marianists awarded Taylor a Marianist Award.[22] He was awarded a Templeton Prize for his research and discoveries about spiritual realities in 2007.[23] Taylor won the Kyoto Prize, which is referred as ‘Japanese Nobel’ for bringing the concept of mutual recognition at the base of multiculturalism and for providing the rational grounds for the dignity of human beings and for their recognition.[24]
1.3.1 Taylor’s Experience of Diversity
Taylor experiences diversity in his history, culture, society and religion. His birth itself signifies diversity. He is born of a Francophone mother and Anglophone father. Therefore, diversity is not an ideal for Taylor, but a way of life.[25] He found as a child the different roles that language plays. He found Anglophones regarding speaking English as a skill. For Francophones, speaking French has an intrinsic and existential significance and it is indispensable for the individual’s identity. This particular experience of his plays an important role in his philosophy of language in which he holds that language expresses and constitutes identity.[26] Living in Montreal for him is experiencing simultaneously as a member of a minority and of a majority culture. His experience of bilinguism and biculturalism has given him an intellectual vantage point from which he starts solving the problem of political fragments especially in Canada.[27]
1.3.2 Taylor: A Catholic
Taylor admits that Catholicism was not imposed on him and declares that he is responsible for his own Catholic Faith. He elucidates: “In my late teens, I got a very strong sense of my faith which is central to my work. But it didn’t happen to everybody (in the family) [;] I guess my sister and brother didn’t feel it as much as I did and it wasn’t something that was very heavily laid upon us.”[28] He also confesses that he attended daily Mass like other Catholics.[29] It is Taylor’s Catholic faith which provided him intellectual responses to the malaises of modernity that he was familiar with (especially in ethics).[30] He accords privileged place to his theistic vision in his moral thought. He considered Catholicism as a synonym of diverse and well defined set of moral goods which moderns cannot fail to embrace.[31] He also owes his involvement in politics to his Catholic tradition. His tradition considered politics as an ethical quest.[32]
1.3.3 Taylor: A Political Actor
Taylor utters that his first love was for politics, to be an active politician than being an academician.[33] Taylor confesses: “It wasn’t that I was driven into politics by the new views that I was exposed to but rather that these views provided a form of direction in a turn like this and then that sent me into the new Democratic Party.”[34] Taylor entered politics at a very young age. In 1954, Taylor launched a campaign to ban the hydrogen bomb in Britain as an undergraduate student. He formulated a petition to ban it. On 21st June, 1,140 undergraduate students signed the petition with slight changes from the original and was sent to the government of Britain. After three years, when he was just 26, he became president of Oxford University’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).[35]
In 1957, he helped to bring out an independent socialist Journal titled, Universities and Left Reviews (ULR). It published seven issues. Then it was amalgamated with New Reasons and took hold of the name New Left Review. In 1961, the New Left Review journal collapsed and reached its end. It coincided with Taylor’s return to Montreal, Canada. In the same year, ‘The New Democratic Party’ was formed. Taylor, the young intellectual, joined the party with full enthusiasm and stood as the candidate of NDP in two federal elections. Taylor lost in both the elections consequently. At this stage, NDP did not have an official part or base to preserve Canadian federalism. The NDP was in need of its own policy and ideological framework. Hence, in 1964, Taylor composed a document which was used as the basis of federal party’s platform.[36] Again in the years 1962 and 1968, he stood in the election as a candidate of NDP, against his own former friend and prominent left-of-centre Quebecker Pierre Trudeau (1919-2000). He lost in both the elections gaining the second place.[37] From 1966 to 1971, he served the party as its vice president. After failing to gain a single seat in several federal elections, many of the leaders of NDP resigned. Taylor too resigned from his office in 1971 and became a professor of philosophy at McGill. Though his political projects ended unsuccessful, his theories have certainly contributed to politics of Canada.[38]
1.4 Taylor’s Style of Writing
Taylor, who is dissatisfied with the ideas that are dominant at the time or at least with the ways in which the problems are formulated, directs his works to solve them.[39] Hence, his mode of philosophizing is problem oriented. They can be read by anybody provided they are interested in the same subject-matter or problem.[40] At the same time, we find in his writings the characteristics of analytic philosophy.[41] He was trained by Oxford, and so was influenced by Oxford’s philosophical culture which was deeply hostile to the traditions.[42] He drew the phenomenological and dialectical traditions of continental Europe to Oxford. Against the analytic philosophers’ grain, he adopted the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). He says that these philosophers had much to offer to Oxford philosophers. He, on the one hand, found Oxford philosophers’ unwillingness for dialogue, and on the other hand, the need for the clarification and refinement of continental philosophy. [43] Therefore, he engaged himself in formulating continental philosophy in analytic tradition. Hence, he is called an analytic exponent of continental philosophy.[44] He also was not happy with the analytical professionalism of philosophy which tried to isolate philosophy from other disciplines. Hence, from the beginning he engaged in producing a living philosophy or philosophy that is conceived in the light of its practical goal.[45] Another main problem that he found in the modern world was its narrowness in looking at reality. In solving this problem, Taylor follows the process of retrieval (his own style).[46]
1.5 Taylor’s Works
Taylor has written dozens of books which explore various disciplines, such as philosophy, religion, political theory, moral theory. Following are the works of Taylor and their themes. The Explanation of Behaviours (1964) is an attack on psychological behaviourism. Hegel (1975) is an effort to introduce the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) to analytic tradition. He chose Hegel due to his interest in philosophical reflection on history especially, on modernity which has been pioneered by Hegel. Hegel and Modern Society (1979) shows the relevance of Hegel. This was written for a general public.[47]
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) is his first attempt to make philosophically informed reflection on history. The theme of the work is to study the development of the modern understanding of the human agent. The Malaise of Modernity (1991) also published as Ethics of Authenticity (1992) explores the conflicting relations to modernity especially modern individualism. Multiculturalism and “the Politics of Recognition” (1992) studies the new concept of identity, a definition of self that modernity has produced. Philosophical Papers 1 and 2 (1985) and Philosophical Arguments are critiques of the mechanistic, reductive and atomistic approaches to human sciences.[48] A Catholic Modernity? (1999) is a lecture given during the Marianist Award ceremony. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (2002) is an off-shoot of William James’ Gifford lecture (1902). Modern Social Imaginaries (2004) defines the shift of our collective understanding of ourselves as a society (existing in an economy, participating in public sphere and being part of a citizen state). Secular Age (2007) is an attempt to follow the development of the modern Western secular age.[49]
1.6 Intellectual Heritage of Taylor
Taylor’s own life (history, culture, experience of diversity, experience of politics, religion and other experiences) plays a key role in his intellectual heritage. “The unity of theory and practice is true for me, in the sense that I have learnt enormously from my involvement in politics. There are things I have learnt that I could never have learnt in books,” admits Taylor.[50] Apart from these experiences, there are very many philosophers such as, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), Johann Gottfried von Herder 1744-1803), Hegel, Aristotle (384 BC -322 BC), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) who have influenced him.[51] However, I would like to mention some philosophers who have greatly influenced him in his process of retrieving the modern atomistic or individualistic self.
1.6.1 Aristotle
Aristotle is the ancient Greek influential philosopher even today. Taylor, who is influenced by him, takes his teleological account[52] to substitute the mechanistic account of sciences[53] about the world and human beings. Taylor directs most of his works towards retrieving the modern self from its limitations. Hence, he appeals to Aristotle’s account of human beings. Aristotle considers human beings as social and political animals and not self-sufficient outside polis.[54] Added to this, Taylor takes Aristotle’s definition of man (woman) that ‘zoon logon echon’ and translates it directly from Greek to English to stress the dialogical aspect of the self.[55]
1.6.2 Rousseau
Taylor accords the origin of ‘expressivism’[56] and the age of dignity[57] to Rousseau. For him, Rousseau is the philosopher who developed the inwardness of the self. Taylor traces the concept of authenticity in Rousseau’s inwardness wherein he considers consciousness as the inner voice and that which speaks the language of nature or that which is the guiding principle of inner self.[58] Individual’s authenticity entails the individual to enter into dialogue with the other. He considers the good community as that which is bound by sensitivity, i.e., the extension of joy and feeling in each other’s company. He observes that the sensitivity as the general-will which keep the community together. Rousseau reconciles the individual freedom and communal belongingness with this general will.[59] Taylor notes that this understanding leaves out the cultural differences. Though he accepts the anti-subjectivism of Rousseau, he rejects him for disregarding the cultural differences. Hence, Taylor who has experienced diversity from his birth seeks better answers to his questions and follows Hegel to find it.[60]
1.6.3 Hegel
Taylor has written two books on the philosophy of Hegel. Hence, he declares, “I sensed then that I wanted to attempt the kind of philosophically informed reflection on history, and particularly the rise of modernity, that Hegel had pioneered.”[61] Hegel’s political theory attempts to hold or seek an interaction between two sets of distinctive concepts. The first is between the goods sought by individuals and community and the second is between the morality of abstract universal principles and community obligations. Taylor finds in Hegel’s philosophy a base to demonstrate the inadequacy of liberal society and a kind of answer to his questions.[62]
Hegel’s philosophy makes theoretical efforts to mediate the conflicts of geography, religion, ethnicity and language. And so, this has attracted many Canadian thinkers to solve the tension that exists in Canada. Taylor takes on Hegel’s thought to reconcile the diverse elements of the Canadian state and to help the diverse cultural communities survive.[63] He takes Hegel’s principle of recognition as the tool to address the issue of identity and differences in pluralistic society,[64] and from master-slave dialectic to consider or regard somebody as individual; he/she must have the sense of worth as an individual. This worthiness is dependent upon the community.[65] Hegel’s influence is vividly seen in Taylor’s attempt to reconcile Greek notions of honour with Christian notion of equality, i.e., all people are equal before God.[66]
1.6.4 Herder
Taylor confesses,
When I was a student in Europe, in a foreign country therefore, I felt a very strong affinity with Herder, the eighteenth-century German philosopher and one of the founders of modern nationalist thinking. Herder devoted much thought to language, the difference between languages, and the distortion in the thinking of a given language group when a larger claims to be superior and better able to express universality, and when it therefore represses other languages. At the time, that language was French, which was invading the German intellectual world and was marginalizing German. In Herder I found inspiration, ideas that were very fruitful for me, precisely because I was from [Canada]. I was able to understand him from the situation I had experienced outside school, outside university, and I was able to engage with his thought, internalize it and (I hope) make something interesting out of it.[67]
Thus Taylor himself expresses Herder’s influence on him. He appropriates Herder’s thought on language and reconciles with Rousseau’s inner voice, i.e., he finds language as the means to reconcile autonomy and heteronomy, self and other and individual and community.[68] Taylor’s critique of modern tendency that which tries to understand human life and behaviour, in terms of natural science has let him promote expressivist view of human conduct.[69]
1.6.5 Heidegger
Heidegger brings out the constitutive elements of human life, i.e., the existence (being-in-the-world). For him, thoughts and actions have their basis only because of our existence. These actions have to be interpreted because human existence is made up of meaning. Understanding of this meaning makes the human actions distinctive. These meanings are determined by interpretation. These interpretations help us shape our identity. Hence, Heidegger makes interpretation as a fundamental human capacity. Taylor shows his indebtedness to Heidegger by aligning himself with the central thesis that human beings are self-interpreting animals.[70] Taylor’s thirst for retrieving modernity takes him to Heidegger’s philosophy of ecology. Heidegger opposes subjectivism and holds that human beings must understand the demands of nature; otherwise, there is no future for them. Taylor works out this concept through Heidegger’s concept of language. For Heidegger, language opens up a space of meaning. This is the origin for human acting. Taylor accepts this concept and builds on his idea on the understanding of what it is to be human.[71]
1.6.6 Merleau-Ponty
The only major philosopher for Taylor is Maurice Merleau-Ponty.[72] He is the key influence on Taylor than Dilthey, Gadamer and others. It is meaning, not the reflective act of interpretation, that is first in the order of Taylor’s concern. He starts his whole project from the particular statement of Merleau-Ponty: “We are condemned to meaning.”[73] For Merleau-Ponty, perceptual knowledge is primary to access the world. We perceive before we could reflect, theorize and judge. Perceiving the subject is being able to describe how things appear to the perceiving subject prior to reflection. Perception signifies a way in which things relate to the desires and purposes of the perceiver.[74] Taylor’s concept of moral framework is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied agency. For Mearleau-Ponty, Being an embodied agent is essential to personhood because in embodiment, the experience of the agent is defined by an orientational structure. Similarly, Taylor propagates that being moral within a moral framework is essential to personhood.[75]
1.76 Conclusion
Charles Taylor, the leading philosopher of post-analytic philosophy of this third millennium, forms his theory or philosophy from his own experience especially from the experience of diversity, experience of Catholicism and the experience in politics. Apart from this fact, he is also influenced by some philosophers like Aristotle, Hegel, Rousseau, Herder and Merleau-Ponty. His philosophy is not system founding rather problem oriented. He tries to find solutions to the problems that he comes across in his experience. One of the main problems that he faces is the narrowness of the modern world (individualism). And so, he directs his philosophy in retrieving the modern self. Therefore, we will first understand the modern self by looking at its history as formulated by Taylor himself, in the next chapter.
[1] James Tully, “Preface,” Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, ed., James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xii. See also Luliana Elena Gavril, “Religious Criticism in Contemporary Philosophical Reflection: Charles Taylor,” European Journal of Science and Theology 2/4 (2006) 17; Karl E. Smith, “Introduction: Charles Taylor,” Thesis Eleven 99 (1009) 3 and E. Smith, “Meaning and Porous Meaning,” 7.
[2] Ruth Abbey, “Introduction: Timely Mediations in an Untimely Mode - The Thought of Charles Taylor,” Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: Charles Taylor, ed., Ruth Abbey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 1. See also E. Smith, “Meaning and Porous Meaning,” 7 and E. Smith, “Introduction: Charles Taylor,” 3.
[3] Ruth Abbey, “The Articulated Life: An Interview with Charles Taylor,” Reason in Practice 1/3 (2001) 3.
[4] Isaiah Berlin, “Introduction,” Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, ed., James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 1, 3.
[5] Robert C. Sibley, Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant and Charles Taylor - Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) 7.
[9] “Quebec,” http://www.espncricinfo.com/southafricavIndia2010/engine/current/match/ 463147.html, accessed on 28/12/10.
[13] “Montreal,” http://www.tutorgig.com/ed/Montreal, accessed on 23/12/10.
[14] Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003) 12.
[15] “Charles Taylor,” http://www.catholic.org/international/internationalstory.php?id= 23406&wf=rsscol, accessed on 23/12/10.
[17] “Charles Taylor,” http://www.catholic.org/international/internationalstory.php?id= 23406&wfrsscol, accessed on 23/12/10.
[18] “Charles Taylor (Philosopher),” http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Charles Taylor (philosopher), accessed on 23/12/10.
[19] Chichele Professorship is a statutory professorship at the University of Oxford. It is named in honour of Henry Chichele, an Archbishop of Canterbury and founder of All Souls College, Oxford. “Chichele Professorship,” http://www.search.com/reference/Chichele_Professorship, accessed on 27/01/11
[20] Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (Lanham: Routledge and Little Field Publishers, 2002) 5. See also Kennedy, 399.
[21] “Charles Taylor (Philosopher),” http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/ Charles Taylor (philosopher), accessed on 23/12/10.
[22] James L. Heft, “Introduction,” A Catholic Modernity?: Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed., James L. Heft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 3.
[23] Daniel Cattau, “The Engaged Philosopher,” http://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/ fall2008/feature/taylor.html, accessed on, 18/12/10.
[24] Daniel Cattau, “The Engaged Philosopher,” http://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/ fall2008/feature/taylor.html, accessed on, 18/12/10.
[26] H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 12. See also Gavril, 17 and Paul Saurette, “Questioning Political Theory: Charles Taylor's Contrarianism,” Political Theory 32 (2004) 725-726.
[28] Mark Redhead, Interview with Charles Taylor, March 3, 1988, 2, as found in Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity, 14.
[34] Mark Redhead, Interview with Charles Taylor, March 3, 1988, 2, as found in Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity, 4.
[40] H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 9. See also Gavril, 17 and Ruth Abbey, “Plus Ça Change: Charles Taylor on Accommodating Quebec’s Minority Cultures,” Thesis Eleven 99 (2009) 72.
[41] Analytical Method became prominent at the beginning of twentieth century. It is a method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thoughts by analyzing them in simpler elements. Thomas Baldwin, “Analytic Philosophy,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed., Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998) 1: 232.
[42] Thomas Nenon, “Continental Philosophy,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition, ed., in Chief Donald M, Borchart (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006) 2: 489.
[43] It is a term that arose after the Second World War in English-Speaking countries as a name for a philosophical approach. Method and theme of that approach is different from that of Analytical philosophy. Continental Philosophy includes the movements of Phenomenology, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism and Feminist Theory. Nenon, 488.
[47] “Charles Taylor,” http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/11/04/dr-charles-taylor/, accessed on 23/12/10.
[48] “Charles Taylor,” http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/11/04/dr-charles-taylor/, accessed on 23/12/10.
[49] “Charles Taylor,” http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/11/04/dr-charles-taylor/, accessed on 23/12/10.
[50] “Charles Taylor – un Philosophe Enracine Dans le Monde: An Interview with Charles Taylor,” Le Devoir (December 14, 1992) as found in H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 17.
[51] “Charles Taylor,” www.we-love-the-net\Free Influencer - Charles Taylor.htm, accessed on 23/12/10.
[52] The changes that take place are natural changes and are normal pattern of development. It takes place in accordance with the intrinsic tendency to result in a given end state. Hence, this end-state or telos becomes the reason for the events to take place in the world. These form part of Aristotle’s astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology. In it, we can distinguish the end states those occur by design and those occur by chance. In it the particular end-state cannot be explained without involving the larger order in which they are naturally set. H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 35-36.
[53] Here change is explained mechanistically, i.e., the change is considered as an accidental change. Some interfering factors disturb the inherent tendencies of the system and bring changes. In it all differences can be explained in terms of the set of antecedent variables. H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 35-37.
[54] Fergus Kerr, “The Self and the Good: Taylor’s Moral Ontology,” Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: Charles Taylor, ed., Ruth Abbey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 85.
[55] Taylor’s translation of Aristotle’s definition of man is explained in detail in the fifth chapter ‘Dialogical Self’. Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 216.
[61] “Charles Taylor,” http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/11/04/dr-charles-taylor/, accessed on 23/12/10.
[62] Sibley, 216. See also Thomas Gil, “The Hermeneutical Anthropology of Charles Taylor,” Concilium: International Journal for Theology 2 (2000) 55.
[67] Guy Laforest, “Introduction,” Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism, ed., Guy Laforest (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) xii. See also Charles Taylor, “Institutions in National Life,” Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federation, ed., Guy Laforest (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005)136.
[68] Sibley, 207. See also Charles Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 230 and Gil, 51.
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