Charles Taylor’s Vision of Modernity: Reconstructions and Interpretations

Charles Taylor is currently one the most renowned and influential contemporary philosophers. He is also widely quoted and discussed both in the social sciences and humanities. Taylor earns this attention through his remarkable capacity for presenting his conceptions in the broadest possible intellectual and cultural context. His philosophical intuition is fundamentally antinaturalistic, and tends toward developing broad syntheses without a trace of systematizing thinking, or any anarchic postmodernist methodology. His thought unites the past with the present, while culture is treated as a broad mosaic of discourses. Religion, art, science, philosophy, politics and ethics are all fields through which the Canadian philosopher deftly moves about in his search for their hidden structures and deepest sense. Taylor’s philosophical output is prodigious. Recently, as his monumental study A Secular Age (2007) indicates, he has been concentrating much of his attention on the problem of secularization.. The selection of contributions in the current volume proffer a penetrating cross section of Taylor’s thought. They are derived from a conference held in October 2008 in Lublin, Poland Although some of the articles are focused on a reconstruction of the philosopher’s concepts, most either engage in a polemic with elements of his thought or find inspiration in it for their own reflections. The contributions are grouped in four parts: 1) philosophy and the modern self; 2) the problem of secularization; 3) between liberalism and communitarianism; and 4) language, literature, and culture.