Charles Taylor is a Canadian thinker best known for his work in philosophy and social/political theory. Bridging theory and practice, Taylor is recogized for both his scholarship and political involvement. His extensive publications span numerous areas of the humanities and social sciences, and have been translated in various languages worldwide.

 

The youngest of three children, Taylor was born in 1931 in Montreal Canada in a bilingual home. Raised by a Protestant father and Roman Catholic Francophone mother, he is a practicing Roman Catholic. After attending private boys school in Montreal, he went on to secondary school at Trinity College in Ontario. He earned his Bachelors degree at McGill University, and went on to complete at BA, MA and PhD as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University’s Balliol College. At Oxford, among the influential thinkers that Taylor studied with were G.E.M. Anscombe and Isaiah Berlin, the latter of whom supervised his thesis and had a seminal influence on Taylor’s conception of liberty and how it related to equality. His doctoral dissertation, which was an analysis and criticism of psychological behaviorism, was later published as The Explanation of Behavior in 1963.

 

Taylor began teaching at McGill University in 1961, and then became Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford in 1976 and fellow at All Souls College. In 1982, he returned to teach at the Political Science Department at McGill and eventually became Professor Emeritus. He retired from McGill in 1998, but in 2001 Taylor returned to teaching and spent 3 years as a visiting professor at Northwestern University. Throughout his teaching career, he also taught in several other universities including Princeton University, the Université de Montréal, the University of California, Berkeley, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Carleton University, Queens University in Ontaria, Canada, University of Frankfurt, and the New School for Social Research in New York.

 

In addition to his teaching and writing, Taylor has been actively involved in Canadian politics. He served as Vice President of the federal New Democratic Party and president of the Québec New Democratic Party. He also ran for Parliament four times in the 1960s. In 1962 he placed third while running for election to the Canadian House of Commons as a member of the new Democratic Party in Mount Royal. A year later, in 1963, he placed second in federal parliamentary elections. The next year, in 1964, he lost his third campaign to future president Pierre Trudeau. His fourth and final campaign was in 1968, where he placed second and won a seat in the House of Commons.

 

Taylor is today considered one of Canada’s most celebrated public thinkers, and has published over 175 essays and 25 books. In his early work, he wrote extensively on Hegel, which resulted in Hegel (1975) and Hegel and Modern Society (1979), the latter of which is a condensed and more accessible version of his original work on Hegel. However, perhaps his most famous work is Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), which is an extensive analysis of sources of modern selfhood. Rejecting the view that modernity has no moral grounds due to the rise of subjectivism, he argues that this very subjectivity has its roots in ideas of the human good. In an effort to map modern moral sources, Taylor claims to uncover what he calls an “affirmation of the ordinary,” in distinction with the hierarchical social forms of the past and concludes that the rejection of rationality that defines modern identity is far richer in moral sources then previously thought.

 

Other key works include The Malaise of Modernity, published in 1991, the same year he delivers a series of talks on CBC Radio about modernity as Massey Lecturer for the Canadian Broadcast Company. This work is followed by The Ethics of Authenticity in 1992. He also published a major essay in 1992 called Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition on how a new concept of identity has been created by modernity which combines history with our own redefinition of ourselves. In 1995 he published Philosophic Arguments, which treats similar themes while emphasizing their epistemological significance. That same year he was made Companion of the Order of Canada, the county’s highest civilian honor, and in 2000 became Grand Official of the National Order of Quebec.

 

In the late 1990s, Taylor increasingly focuses on questions about religion. In 1997 he delivered his Marianist Lecture in Dayton, Ohio on the catholic church and its relation to modern society. He expresses optimism that the church may find a place among all civilizations and cultures, without the need for a total fusion, according to Taylor. This lecture is followed by another series of lectures of significance on the same topic called the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University about secularism in the West and treats the thoughts of William James. Soon after he lectured on William James on Religion at Harvard University. His book A Catholic Modernity? was published in 1999 and continues his treatment of the Roman Catholic Church’s relation to Modernity. This book is followed by Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited in 2002, which derives from his earlier Gifford Lectures. A year later he became the first recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Gold Medal for Achievement in Research. A second book is published out of the same lectures- Modern Social Imaginaries, in 2004.

 

Finally, in 2007, Taylor published another study from these lectures, the same year he wins the prestigious Templeton Prize and serves with Gérard Bouchard on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on Reasonable Accommodation with regard to cultural differences in Quebec. His third book out of these lectures, titled A Secular Age, traces aspects of secularism across the history of what he calls “Western Christendom”. Finally, in 2011 he publishes Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, which treats questions started in A Secular Age regarding the continuity of religion, the nature of secularism, the limits of reason and the dangers of moralism. He also brings in a host of other thinkers including Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Brandom, and Paul Celan while exploring these questions. Today, Taylor’s thoughts on diversity and multiculturalism are more timely than ever, and despite some of his political failures and numerous critics, his voluminous combination of works continue to be highly regarded in Canada and beyond.