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What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

Customer Reviews (23)

Connecting the dots between secularity and religion
Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" is an important, even critical, contribution to the apparently stalemated engagement between religionism and scientism.
People in whom a post enlightenment scientific world view is thoroughly embedded and who nonetheless are moved, challenged and shaped by the imagery, poetry, ritual, music, philosophy, ethics and transcendent aspirations of religion can only stand aside these days and wring their hands in despair at the superficiality, indeed banality, of the contest between religion's more militant protagonists and the more strident apostles of unbelief.
While religion's most militant promoters propose systems of belief and morality that could only be tenable in a universe parallel to, but having no part in, our own, unbelief's champions promote a psychological,philosophical and cultural amnesia that suggests that the only human thought worth regarding as in any way responsible began in the 1660's.
It's a sort of intellectual and cultural trench warfare where the gains on either side are minimal and the losses incalculable: "A senseless waste of human life".
In "A Secular Age" Charles Taylor painstakingly traces the making of our secular age and exposes the "unthought" that underlies much of the championed opinions on both sides. In doing so he lays bare the parameters of secularity and exposes the religious substrata upon which society's best and worst aspirations are based.
He does this by telling the story of how we came to this time and state, expertly revealing the story's complexity. One can't help smiling as one reads his deceptively easy style and gets the uncomfortable feeling that he's been 'reading our mail.'
Since the publication of Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" the battle cries of militant religionists and apostles of unbelief alike cannot be taken seriously anymore. Being cut from the same cloth, their exactly alike intellectual underwear has been exposed.
The way is open for a considered, integrative approach to the relationship between secularity and spirituality. What a relief.

A Literary Jungle
A Secular Age
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007, 874 pages)
The book is almost unreadable.
Quite apart from its questionable thesis, exposited by reviews in at least nine different journals and magazines, Taylor defeats his own presumed purpose of convincing us of that thesis by foisting on us over 800 pages of turgid fine print, embalming a conversational and ungrammatical text apparently dictated from notes and left quite unedited.Taylor's bad word-choices, clumsy sentence structures, mixed metaphors, inappropriate use of slang (e.g. verbs and adjectives used as nouns and vice versa), undefined terms of art (e.g. Foucault's "unthought" on p. 427), untranslated foreign words and phrases, verbless sentences, unattributed quotations, pronouns with indefinite referents, overuse of Taylor's own acronyms, etc., constantly obscure his meaning.
Just a few examples of his hermetic formulations are: "Of course, Nietzsche shows where this ape argument can go when you reject the MMO" (p. 596); "Like Nietzsche, he sees that not evrybody can hack this, most people's lives are enmired in grayness, but his glitters" (p. 602); "On the crucial issue, what we have morally or spiritually to learn from our suffering, it is firmly on the therapeutic side: the answer is 'nothing'" (p. 621).
To return to Taylor's thesis: Although the whole book is about the highly ambiguous concept of "secularization," after introducing on p. 423 an unexplained something called "secularization theory," only on p. 426 does Taylor even venture to wonder what "the idea of 'secularization'" is all about; on p. 427 to characterize it as "some kind of decline of religion"; and then to wonder whether the term might indeed have other meanings--meanwhile making no attempt to distinguish between such terms as "secularity," "secularization," and "secularism": all terms precisely defined long ago in other disciplines and even made the subjects of learned encyclopedia articles.
--Charles Dickinson

perfect
I speak about the librarian product and the bookseller.
It arrived in perfect conditions without dilay.

A secular age
Good book specially because I do not share final conclusions or even some approach but it helps me to rethink some ideas... that is what I am looking for when I have a book in my hands.

Secularism and its Discontents
Quite a number of books have been written in recent years repudiating the classical secularization thesis of social science, which claims that as societies modernize, they become less religious.Peter Berger's THE DESCULARIZATION OF THE WORLD is a good example because forty years ago Berger was himself a proponent of the secularization thesis.So it was with some surprise that I eyed the title of Charles Taylor's A SECULAR AGE.Can this perspicacious Canadian philosopher actually be reaffirming the thesis?No.Taylor and Berger are quite similar when it comes to recognizing the futility of the modern attempt to liquidate the transcendent in the name of a progressive, exclusive humanism.The abuses of religion-- crusades, indulgences, inquisitions--understandably motivated some to construct a world without religion, but the result-- our secular age-- is both liberating and suffocating.Exclusive humanists are committed to the proposition that whatever was beautiful in religion can be translated into humanism without loss.And that which was not beautiful will be well lost.Yes, that sunset is beautiful-- but it is just as beautiful (if not more so) when it is seen as a testament not to the glory of God but to the human spirit.But Taylor judges that this attempt to fit the transcendent into the Procrustean bed of "the immanent frame" has produced the "unquiet frontiers of modernity.""Our age is very far from settling in to a comfortable unbelief" (p. 727).But the critical distinction for Taylor is not between belief and unbelief but between transcendence and immanence.Like many religious thinkers, he recognizes that religiosity is not always accurately reflected in self-reports.Unbelievers can be more open to God than believers.His goal is the articulation of a religious sensibility which simultaneously leaves humans vulnerable to "external transcendence" (God)-- a vulnerability against which the autonomous modern self is "buffered"-- and acknowledges the goodness of ordinary human life (including sexuality)-- which religion has too often suppressed in the name of ideological purity.If we are to "get real," we can neither deny our humanity nor God.But that is not his goal in this book, in which he tries-- in the best Hegelian fashion-- to illuminate the cunning of history (i.e., explain how we wound up in a secular age).The reader who is able to follow Taylor's long (but accessible) history will be in a position to participate in the articulation of the needed sensibility.
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Customer Reviews (6)

Concise but sometimes confusing
I'm glad Taylor wrote this short, concise book. His book Sources of the Self, a long tour through modern Western ideas of the human individual and their implications for moral philosophy, is wonderful and illuminating; but you don't always want to read 800 pages. So this book has the virtue of relative brevity. It also extends Taylor's ideas about Western thought from models of modern selfhood to modern institutions: the market and political self-governance.

But I have to agree with "Squirrel's" comment that this book is not always clear. The sentences are always lucid and graceful. The examples are germane. But Taylor too rarely pauses to explain the implications of this analysis (as he does very beautifully in Sources of the Self). Unless you already know the larger framework of Taylor's philosophy, it can be hard to puzzle out exactly why he has been going on about a given topic. I tried to use this book in a graduate course, but most of the students had difficulty detecting what was at stake in Taylor's arguments.

This is a case where one might wish a short book were just a bit longer. If Taylor had added even a couple of pages to each chapter, unpacking the larger implications for the way he had just mapped out a given sector of the modern social imaginary, it would have made this a better book. Even so, the map itself is learned and valuable.

Excellent dissection of the ideology of modernity
This book is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (not to be confused with the Liberian ex-dictator of the same name!) at his most concise and accessible. Here he uses his typical "history of ideas" approach to explaining the content of the modern way of seeing the world, one that so profoundly affects the West and its policies yet is so hard to describe.

Taylor's general philosophical project is to attack the idea of Western liberalism as being a "neutral" or "non-ideological" view of the world, and to downplay its role in the formation of modern man. Instead, he proposes a more communitarian view of liberalism, where liberalism is one comprehensive moral doctrine between others, but happens (for historical reasons) to be one that has been very succesful in shaping the mindset of Western man, rather more so than it has been succesful politically.

Taylor also rejects many of the ideas of liberalism itself, in particular the "rights-based" thinking and its concept of the individual's relation to his culture. The former is most clearly seen in his book "Sources of the Self", whereas the latter is most clearly expressed in this work. The modern social imaginary, i.e. the ways in which modern man is capable of seeing the world (which is not the same as the way he sees the world!) is explored from every possible cultural and philosophical angle.

On the whole, his communitarian philosophy tends to be conservative, but rather of the traditionalist conservative kind than of the religiously inspired reactionary kind one sees in the US so much (though Taylor is very catholic). His interests are clearly in defining what makes modernist culture a culture of its own and why it is a historically developed integral whole, not a content-neutral political system as many liberals seem to think it is. Because of this appeal to historicism, Taylor's work is also very useful and interesting for more radical progressives seeking to criticize the liberal's claims to neutrality and autonomy.

On the whole, this booklet (less than 200 pages of content) is an exciting and relatively legible summary of Taylor's views on Western society and where it came from. Recommended to everyone except those who have read Taylor's larger works (especially "Sources of the Self" and "Multiculturalism"), for whom it will perhaps not be as new as it was for me.

How we imagine who we are
Charles Taylor, along with Will Kymlicka, represents Canada's claim to be taken seriously as an intellectual superpower. In this small work, he has brought his immense intellect to bear on the question of how we imagine who we are as members of societies. For students of political theory this is a useful work.

Lucid Brilliance
Charles Taylor is one of the Western world's foremost intellectuals and theorists of what is broadly called "modernity" which begins somewhere around the 16th century and continues today, even as it is challenged by so-called "post-modernists".The current work puts the concept of modernity into a theoretical framework which Taylor terms the "social imaginary" (hence the title of the book).

The "social imaginary", broadly speaking, consists of images, stories and legends, is shared by large groups of people, and serves to make possible "common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy" (23).The particularities of the *modern* social imaginary is that "Modernity is secular ... in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all action takes place in profane time" (194).The modern social imaginary consists of the objectivity of the economic sphere, the public sphere (which is beyond the control of any particular political or religion interest group) vs. the private sphere (which is the sphere of the family and of religion), and the sovereignty of "the people".

What emerges, then, is a series of fairly thick discussions of political philosophy, economic theory and, yes, theology.Taylor ties modernity to Protestantism for in setting itself against the medieval/catholic worldview of sacred time (feast and fast days with their attendant saints, liturgical seasons) and the broadly accepted idea that the world was enchanted - miracles, angels, demons and saints were all a part of the medieval worldview - time itself became a profane realm such that it would eventually become eclipsed by nationalism with its own local feast days and national saints (patriots, so to speak).The disenchantment of the world, then, is the foundation of the modern social imaginary and all modernities are rooted in this disenchantment.

This disenchantment, however, is by no means the exorcising of the idea of a moral order.What the aforementioned disenchantment serves to do is to root the belief in a moral order in something other than a transcendent realm: nature.Nature, reason and science all serve to metaphysically ground a particular understanding of people - that they are fundamentally reasonable/rational - and, from this, that society must necessarily progress along natural, reasonable lines.This understanding of people makes people sovereign, so to speak, and eventually serves to ground what Taylor sees as the ultimate myth of modernity: the American myth of "We the people..." founding their own political *order*.

This is a brilliant work and, despite its highly theoretical orientation, should be picked up by all who are interested in discussions of moderity, religion, the public sphere, democracy, and the moral order.As an extended discussion of a central section of his Gifford Lectures of 1999, "Living in a Secular Age", it also serves as a tantalizing prelude to Taylor's next book.

Brilliant - though often confusing.
In Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor does what he does best - trace the trajectories of certain ideas that we take as unquestionable truths. In this particular piece, he examines the "imaginaries" of the market economy, the public sphere, and the notion of self-governing people. He then provides a facinating examination of the French Revolution in contrast to the American Revolution to demonstrate how new imaginaries are built upon past imaginaries -- with stunningly different results.

I must say -- one thing that troubles me about Taylor is his writing style. He is often hard to follow. He has a habit of saying there are three points to x, but then not clearly stating what they are. Also, he often goes off on an example that is fascinating -- but it is difficult to know what his point is because he doesn't tie it back to his main argument clearly.

This said - I still think this is an amazing book. I would reccommend keeping his argument in mind as you read his examples because he is so interesting that it is tempting to get lost in them, and lose the argument in the process. ... Read more

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This is a major and comprehensive study of the philosophy of Hegel, his place in the history of ideas, and his continuing relevance and importance. Professor Taylor relates Hegel to the earlier history of philosophy and, more particularly, to the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his own time. He engages with Hegel sympathetically, on Hegel's own terms and, as the subject demands, in detail. This important book is now reissued with a fresh new cover. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent Commentary
A sweeping, insightful and erudite survey of Hegel's work, originally published in 1975 Taylor text has become a modern classic in the field of Hegelian studies. The following comments are offered for potential purchasers.

First, a few minor criticisms. From a physical perspective the text (paperback) is less than ideal; the font is small and at nearly 600 pages the book is a bit too bulky.Stylistically, Taylor has his eccentricities, occasionally mixing top flight academic prose with awkward colloquialisms and ill-fitting literary devices, e.g. an unnatural interspersing of untranslated French terms where English or German terminology would seem more appropriate.

These few drawbacks aside the text has much strength.Hegel is a notoriously difficult read for the uninitiated.In this regard Taylor is particularly effective in using an appropriate combination of technical Hegel-speak and non-Hegelian terminology to both maintain the author's meaning and make it more accessible. Perhaps the greatest value, of Taylor's work, however, is the corrective it offers to much modern Hegelian scholarship.Often scholars are guilty of reading their worldviews back into the thought of earlier thinkers.While to a degree this is unavoidable, when overdone it can be quite misleading. An example of this is the tendency of twentieth century thinkers to read their atheistic/materialistic assumptions into early-modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, often dismissing the clearly theistic views/comments of these early thinkers as nothing more than the idiom of the day and, in the process often recasting them as radical atheists.This is particularly distorting with regard to Hegel.Divorced from his pantheistic teleological view of embodied spirit much of his subsequent thought becomes incoherent nonsense.Finally, the concluding chapter on the contemporary relevance of Hegelian thought is helpful in situating Hegel in the modern Western tradition- although recent developments (i.e. the demise of communism), have likely made it of lesser interest to the broader public.

Overall the text is highly recommended for students of German idealism - an excellent if rather dense tomb.A solid background in modern philosophy, however, is likely a prerequisite to enjoying this work.

Making the case for Hegel
Since I'm not half through, I wouldn't be reviewing this if anyone else had stepped up.I'm enjoying the book.Hegel's been a sore spot ever since the seminar on the "Phenomenology of Spirit" where I felt like a complete illiterate trying to read him (in translation no less).

Since Hegel's practically the definition of "pseudo-philosophy" in the English-speaking world, it's fascinating to read this treatment by a sensible English (?) philosopher.Taylor does a great job in the 1st chapter setting up Hegel's problematic, with a survey of German romanticism and its issues.Those issues are in large part still with us today, so that Hegel's working on problems that should be of interest to us.

But are those problems solvable?Can we take seriously someone who argues that "the rational is real, and the real is rational"?Taylor's carefully developing and qualifying Hegel's claims of universal rationality and trying to see his case for them.

Even if you hate Hegel, or think you do, the great anti-Hegelian Bertrand Russell said that the 1st step to evaluating a philosophy is to engage with it as sympathetically as possible (in a bit of a Hegelian moment himself as I recall:sympathy-antipathy-evaluation).This book may be your best shot in English.

Nietzsche argued that (1) the world is meaningless and "irrational," and that (2) humans cannot accept (1).If he's right, then something like Hegel's system may be the necessary consequence. ... Read more

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Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences. ... Read more

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A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.

Praise for the previous edition: ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Remains a seminal work on the issues surrounding multiculturalism
Charles Taylor's classic essay "The Politics of Recognition" that constitutes the heart of this book along with the several excellent responses to it remains at the center of the philosophical and political discussions of multiculturalism.Taylor's main contribution to the debate was to link the debate to the concept of authenticity, arguing that an individual's sense of self requires not merely a social context but respect that affirms them.Because group identity is a crucial aspect of one's sense of self, to have one's tradition or group recognized and respected becomes crucial.Taylor therefore concludes that under certain circumstances the state may intervene with prejudice to protect a group or provide it with special benefits.He situates this very contemporary position in the context of the history of the notion of authenticity as it has developed in Western culture.

Taylor's essay comprises, along with editor Amy Gutman's introduction, around half the book.The bulk of the volume consists of a number responses that were contained in the original publication of the book as well as two subsequent essays that were added to a later addition.All of these are, to speak truthfully, absolutely first rate, though they are of varying usefulness.Most of the first edition essays merely amend Taylor's original arguments.Why I think they make important alterations to his essay, none of them reach the heart of it.To be frank, Taylor is a wonderfully engaging, persuasive writer.Even if one has troubles with many of his core ideas, nonetheless even the most disengaged reader will agree with a host of his insights.If he errs, he does not err wildly.

The final two essays do take issue with Taylor on a deeper level.The Habermas essay is not, in my view, especially helpful.He is unquestionably one of the premiere philosophers of his age, but although he has been influenced by Anglo-American philosophy to a degree that is unusual in a German philosopher, his essays seems alien to every other essay in the collection.One first has to understand Habermas and then engage in the difficult work of fitting it to the discussion as initiated by Taylor.I simply did not find it to be terribly helpful.The essay by Kwame Anthony Appiah, on the other hand, is a different matter.Appiah is the lone writer to respond to Taylor's challenge and lay bare many of the shortcomings of his argument.He has gone on to do this additionally in his exceptionally fine THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY.Most of the ideas contained in his essays in this volume show up in expanded form in that book.Essentially, Appiah wants to question Taylor's assumption that political rights attach to groups as they do to individuals.More to the point, he wants to deny that groups are the basic unit of political consideration.Taylor believes that groups can be extended rights to such a degree that lesser rights of individuals can be impinged.For instance, in French Canada children of French-speaking parents can have access to English-language schools banned so as to guarantee the continued existence of a French-speaking population to keep Quebec French-speaking.Appiah is suspicious of the limitations on individuals that such considerations place on them, of the kinds of scripts and expectations imposed upon them.Appiah can hardly be accused of parochialism.As the child of a Ghanese father and white English mother--and therefore in the algebra of our society considered black--who was raised in Ghana, educated in England, and lives in America, and who is also gay, he falls into a number of groups that could be considered collectivities deserving of special consideration.But he finds such thinking in the long run harmful to the individuals in such groups.He is acutely aware of how a culture is essential in providing the raw material for any person to be a person, but he insists in the end that the individual and not groups--that may be impossible to define clearly in addition to all else--is the fundamental political unit.

Multiculturalism
I found this book to be well written and therefore, very easy to read.Wonderful new material. I have learned several new theories.

Academic professionalism
At first sight the book seems so insightful - and it clearly stems from a sincere wish to understand other cultures and others holding different views than one's own within one's own culture. But then comes page 20.Gutmann writes that the task is to rescue us from a world of entrenchedbattlefields and point the way to "mutually respectful communities ofsubstantial, sometimes even fundamental, INTELLECTUAL disagreement"(my emphasis).What such a viewpoint does is to limit the discussion torational discourse. One can agree on a base-line of open discussion withthose you may be in diasagreement with but only when the 'crazies' havebeen left outside, those who preach hatred, or even those who choose to optout. This is all what Richard Rorty called 'wet liberalism'. Terriblydisappointing. After Gutmann's intellectualist and ultimately elitist pointof view dawns, the other essays fall within the same light.

A timely debate, with an emphasis on the philosophical.
One web page which I recently encountered urged the USA to adopt an official policy of multiculturalism, and thereby become the first great nation to make this postmodern leap; ahead of the U.K., and all of theother states which have considered such a move. Yet Canada and Australiahave been formally self-designated as multicultural states for decades.What has been the result, and what does multiculturalism offer otherpluralist states, such as the United States, in the 21st century? Afterall, some say that the end of the 'melting pot' would be the end ofnational unity in America, while others feel it would truly be thebegining.In this book, neither the 'potential for utopia', nor the'armageddon scenario' of multicultural policies will be appeased. ProfessorCharles Taylor examines the implications of state-enshrinedmulticulturalism, and then opens the floor to several of the world'sleading intellectuals (including Jurgen Habbermas) to debate the topic inthis 'heady' little book. The result is rather surprising.Rather thannarrowing in on the details of the Canadian or Australian experiences withthe policy, the book explores the entire developement of modern liberalismwhich lead to such policies, and devotes many pages to the argumentconcerning whether such policies weaken individual rights, while creatingcollective rights.This is not a manual for extremists, on either sideof the debate, but it should aid those who seek to peer deeply beneath thesurface of multicultural policies unearthing their philosophical base. Theimplications of such policies are widely considered, and for a wide rangeof groups across North America and Europe.

A sophisticated philosophical defense ofmulticulturalism
If you want to read a justification for the politics of difference, this isw your book. Taylor stays consistent with his previous work and lays out a solid theory. The only criticism of this book (and Taylor in general) is that his personal political views on Quebec get in the way of his philosophical writing and creates some tension in terms of the practical aplication of the theory. ... Read more

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A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present.

Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place.

Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.

Customer Reviews (4)

Not much of a stylist
For style and clarity, Taylor is no match for William James. I would advise anyone who hasn't read James yet to get a copy from their local library. Update? Hardly. James is the deeper thinker and a far better writer.

Charles Taylor and William James
Charles Taylor's "Varieties of Religion Today," is a superb reflection on the importance of William James' commentary on religion a century ago. In a precise, brief, and resonant book, Taylor conveys a vivid sense of James' insights, yet provides a valuable critique of his "Varieties of Religious Experience" and "Will to Believe,"for the contemporary reader.In addition to being a incisive essay in its own right, "Varieties of Religion Today"
is a useful introduction to several of Taylor's other books and principal concerns as a philosopher, includingon the ethics of belief.I have already read the book three times, and look forward to returning to it, as each reading reveals another level of understanding and insight into the state of religion and secularism in the U.S. particulary and other Western nations.A virtue of the book for this reader, who isn't a philosopher, is the clarity of language and lack of professional jargon.

Varieties of Reading Experience
This book is a fascinating, thought-provoking meditation on religious issues related to William James' classic work. Taylor's take on religious developments in Western Europe/North America is fascinating and enlightening in several senses of the word. And while truly respectful of William James and his insights, Taylor is no cheerleader and convincingly discusses a number of James' key blind spots along with their probable sources. The book's brevity and readability belies the punch it packs.
The one glaring imperfection is the pedantic and pretentious refusal to translate French quotations, some of which seem like they're probably quite important. Too bad, I'll never know for sure.

A reflection on religious belief and the state
This book is a collection of a series of lectures Charles Taylor gave reflecting on the legacy of William James.In thinking about James' work, Taylor reflects on the tensions between private religous experience and public religious expression; the problem of belief and unbelief; and the implications our religious beliefs have for our political organization.It is almost impossible to do justice to the richness of Taylor's thought in a short review.

Taylor's first task is to situate James within his own religious context.James inherited the strand of religious belief that was quintessentially Protestant -- with an emphasis on private feeling as against public expression.For James, the ultimate religious experience is private and fundamentally individual.This precludes James from fully grasping the types of religious expression that are more communally-based.

Taylor's second task is to reflect on James personal struggle with the question of belief and unbelief.In James' day a strong argument was being made that religious belief is intellectually dishonest.Taylor offers a good summary of James' defense of belief as a viable choice.

Finally, Taylor integrates James' thought with the question of how our religious belief interacts with our political structures.Taylor offers an invaluable historical narrative of the variety of relationships between religion and state that we have seen in the past.In doing so, he makes our current dilemmas much clearer.We are moving from a country that has a broad consensus in some sort of belief, but which allows individuals to join whatever church best gives expression to that experience, to a country in which there is no such broad consensus.If there is no shared understanding of the sacred, we are forced to ground our political structures in the purely human.It is not yet clear whether the new project will succeed, but in his reflections on the tensions between belief and unbelief and their relationship to our political organization, Taylor can only enhance our discussions as we move forward into this virgin territory.

Taylor's book does presume that the reader has a fairly sophisticated historical sense.And he often makes reference to the situation in France, which can be a bit opaque to those who lack a basic familiarity with French culture.Indeed, he often quotes from French writers without offering a translation.Still, the book offers valuable insights, even to those without the background to fully grasp everything he writes. ... Read more

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Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity's challenges.

At the heart of the modern malaise, according to most accounts, is the notion of authenticity, of self-fulfillment, which seems to render ineffective the whole tradition of common values and social commitment. Though Taylor recognizes the dangers associated with modernity's drive toward self realization, he is not as quick as others to dismiss it. He calls for a freeze on cultural pessimism.

In a discussion of ideas and ideologies from Friedrich Nietzsche to Gail Sheehy, from Allan Bloom to Michel Foucault, Taylor sorts out the good from the harmful in the modern cultivation of an authentic self. He sets forth the entire network of thought and morals that link our quest for self-creation with our impulse toward self-fashioning, and shows how such efforts must be conducted against an existing set of rules, or a gridwork of moral measurement. Seen against this network, our modern preoccupations with expression, rights, and the subjectivity of human thought reveal themselves as assets, not liabilities.

By looking past simplistic, one-sided judgments of modern culture, by distinguishing the good and valuable from the socially and politically perilous, Taylor articulates the promise of our age. His bracing and provocative book gives voice to the challenge of modernity, and calls on all of us to answer it.

Customer Reviews (7)

The Ethics Of Authenticity
For non-native English speaker, the language is rather complex. Thus providing a learning experience in that too. Excellent book, assumes the reader has at least some basic understanding of philosphical phenomena and theories. For a business executives: Do not take it for speed-reading, the more time you spend with the book the more you get out of it.
Very good and concise presentation of the topic, I also found several thinking patterns and models that are labelled differently in managemen/leadership books. Taylor gives great points for the future leaders, leaders of generation Y (or generation C, "C" standing for communities like the numerous virtual networks in internet).
This book helps You think, it doesn't give specific answers or "think it for You"!
Thinking doesn't hurt. :-)

Highly academic
This book was highly academic, barely practical and ill-fitting to my intentions for buying it. Disappointed.

Malaises and their mending
Charles Taylor focuses on three malaises of modernity in this short book. The first is individualism, which comprises a set of liberties and beliefs having to do with the privilege of the individual to determine his or her course of life. Taylor thinks individualism has removed us from concerns originating outside the self; the result is a narrowing and flattening of our lives. The second malaise is the primacy of instrumental reason. Cost-benefit analyses and means-to-an-end rationality have cost us our genuine respect and concern for human beings. In effect, humanity takes a back seat to the bottom line. Morality is pushed out of ethics, since what we should do depends on what we can get and what we need to get it, and not on what is right or good, praiseworthy or blameworthy, virtuous or vicious. Finally, the third malaise of the modern era has to do with the implications of individualism and instrumental reason for political, social, and economic institutions. Here Taylor's analysis is brief and weak. He basically laments what he sees as a lack of a sense of civic duty among the inhabitants of politically developed nations. The progress of technology and the organizational structure of bureaucracies have weakened our democratic initiative. We are in danger of becoming willing victims of a "soft" despotic government. The only way out of our current situation is to develop and adhere to an ethic of authenticity that makes concerns beyond the self a necessary precondition of self-concern. Furthermore, if we are to fly out of the "iron cage" of modernity, we must acknowledge various modes of reasoning and chose those that preserve our moral integrity. Although Taylor does not offer us detailed solutions to the proposed malaises, he at least turns our heads toward some of the possible paths we may take.

A Great Little Overview of Integral Ethics
Lately I'd been reading various critiques of modernity- Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom, the "neoconservatives", and conservatives in general, who see nothing but a great moral and intellectual decay in modern society, beset by postmodern relativism and an intellectual trap that can't be escaped short of "noble" (read: blatant) lies.While I found many of their arguments quite convincing, something just didn't quite sit right with me.

Taylor explained exactly what's wrong with such critiques- they ignore the fact that "relativism" is merely a perversion of a powerful moral standard that these conservatives ignore- the ethic of authenticity, of being true to one's self and to the rights of others, a liberal standard of the enlightenment that conservatives threaten to destroy along with the excesses of postmodern nihilism.Taylor then goes on a quest to take down both the "boosters" and "knockers" of modernity- and points out where they're right and wrong.

For anyone wrestling with the liberal and conservative debates in this country today, I recommend this little volume heartily, along with Taylor's (much larger) "Sources of the Self" and Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution", which takes on the same issues from multiple perspectives.

An ethic whose time has come
This is a short and powerful book.The frequent references to Taylor's "Sources of the Self" may indicate that it is a mere introduction to the longer work, but I feel that it stands well alone.

Taylor, a Canadian, observes the conservative-liberal debate in America from an outsider's position.He is able to distance himself from the rhetoric, vocabulary, and narrow categories of this debate.I found his insights well worth consideration.

In essence, Taylor attempts to redefine the debate.His concerns are threefold.First, radical individualism has disavowed most moral absolutes, eroded the meaningfulness of life, and resulted in a centripetal self-orientation that denigrates relational connectiveness.Secondly, Taylor is concerned that modern thought has become dominated by a reason that finds the highest good in the economic maximizing of ends.This "instrumental reason" demeans others as mere means to an end, disregards important perspectives that are not integral to the cost/benefit equation, and creates a technological supremacy that may cost us our humanity.Thirdly, Taylor is concerned that institutions have embraced instrumental reason as supreme and creating a power-base that may stand in the way of reform.

Most of this book deals exclusively with Taylor's thoughts on the first of these concerns.Conservatives will be upset that Taylor does not call for a return to older values and older worldviews.Instead, he accepts the modern emphasis on individualism and the corollaries of self-fulfillment and self-actualization.He parts with these liberal ideals by arguing that the centripetal self-focus can only find meaning outside of the self.Discovery of my originality and uniqueness is a dialogical process (with others, values, or deity) that demands an objective "horizon."

Hence, my definition of Taylor's authenticity is the dialogical discovery of my "being."Others are not used to complete my project, but are collaborators and partners.Together we work to throw off the shackles of psychological, institutional, and familial pressures to conform.Freedom from these shackles is not license to abuse, but becomes ground to assume responsibility for self without excuse.Radical individualism escapes meaninglessness only in dialogic connectedness and assumption of personal responsibility.

In my view, the ethics of authenticity are much needed.I hope this book finds many receptive readers. ... Read more

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There are, always, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in one’s philosophy—and in these essays Charles Taylor turns to those things not fully imagined or avenues not wholly explored in his epochal A Secular Age. Here Taylor talks in detail about thinkers who are his allies and interlocutors, such as Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Brandom, and Paul Celan. He offers major contributions to social theory, expanding on the issues of nationalism, democratic exclusionism, religious mobilizations, and modernity. And he delves even more deeply into themes taken up in A Secular Age: the continuity of religion from the past into the future; the nature of the secular; the folly of hoping to live by “reason alone”; the perils of moralism. He also speculates on how irrationality emerges from the heart of rationality itself, and why violence breaks out again and again.

In A Secular Age, Taylor more evidently foregrounded his Catholic faith, and there are several essays here that further explore that faith. Overall, this is a hopeful book, showing how, while acknowledging the force of religion and the persistence of violence and folly, we nonetheless have the power to move forward once we have given up the brittle pretensions of a narrow rationalism.

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Charles Taylor is one of the most distinctive figures in the landscape of contemporary philosophy. His ability to contribute to philosophical conversations across a wide spectrum of ideas is especially impressive in a time of increasing specialization. These areas include moral theory, theories of subjectivity, political theory, epistemology, hermeneutics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and aesthetics. Most recently, Taylor has branched into the study of religion. Written by a team of international authorities, this collection will be read primarily by students and academic professionals in philosophy, political science, and religious studies, and will also appeal to a broad swathe of professionals across the humanities and social sciences. Ruth Abbey is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at University of Kent at Canterbury. She has published numerous articles and is author of Nietzsche's Middle Period (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Philosophy Now: Charles Taylor (Princeton University Press, 2000). ... Read more

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The Skilled Pastor is a creative and practical training book that details the specific skills necessary for sound pastoral guidance in various situations. The author integrates theological reflection with practice, while incorporating religious resources with counseling technique. ... Read more

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The Skilled Pastor
This book give great insight to pastoral skills in counseling. A must for both new and experienced pastors and for laity who visit.

Reviewing the Skilled Pastor
I enjoyed Charles Taylor's book and learned a great deal. While based on Scripture, Taylor's book gives concrete examples of what to do and what to avoid when counseling. His use of this teaching method made things very clear for me.

Listen, Love, Christ
We used this book in our Lay / seminary training. It is Excellent. The tips on body language and listening skills is great

The Skillled Pastor
This book is very good for persons whose grasp of psychology and religious training tend to be basic in understanding. It can be a valuable help in this situation.

Counseling as the practice of theology
Professor Taylor combines remarkable theological insight with equally remarkable understanding of what's needed in real-life pastoral situations: theory and practice are interwoven.Taylor's main thesis is "The way to help persons deal with their problems is to help them change the beliefs that contribute to their distressing feelings and behaviors.Thus, the goal...is to help people change through hearing and responding to the gospel." (p. 137) Taylor presents three types of pastoral skills needed to accomplish this goal, and presents information on specific techniques that undergird each skill.His underlying theology is centered on the gospel.For the student pastor trying to serve God and his/her fellow humans, Taylor's logical, step-by-step analysis of pastoral encounters and appropriate helping strategies can be invaluable.Although the book is remarkably clearly written, this is not easy material to put into practice, and you'll benefit from practice with a peer group, supervisor, or classroom teaching. ... Read more

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Introduction to Hegel's thought for the student and general reader, emphasizing in particular his social and political thought and his continuing relevance to contemporary problems. ... Read more

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N.B.: Dupicative of certain chapters of Taylor's "Hegel."
The book does deserve five stars--but there is a need to call attention to the preface of "Hegel and Modern Society," which is absent from the free, searchable content available here.Professor Taylor candidly puts it, in the preface, that this book is substantially the same as the various chapters in his excellent "Hegel" dealing with Hegel's relation to contemporary society.In short, if you own a volume of Taylor's "Hegel" you already have the content of this book--you needn't buy both.

Accessibility without simplification
Hegel is notoriously difficult to understand.When an exposition of his philosophy, entitled "The Secret of Hegel", was published in the 19th century, a critic accused its author of "keeping thesecret."Charles Taylor, by contrast, without academic arrogance--infact, with characteristic humility--makes brilliantly accessible thisabstruse philosopher.Taylor eloquently extracts the essence and logic ofHegel's arguments; and shows the relationships between Hegel's metaphysicsand social philosophy; thereby revealing to the reader the whole system ofHegel's philosophy, rather than its isolated components.Along the way, hedispels many of the false myths that surround Hegel's often quoted butrarely read philosophies.And not only does Taylor make sense of Hegel inthe philosopher's own historical and intellectual contexts, but, as thetitle of the book implies, Taylor shows the relevance that Hegel's ideasstill hold today.This is a gem of a book for people studying Hegel, forpeople studying philosophy, political science, or history.Highlyrecommended. ... Read more

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Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences. ... Read more

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Charles Taylor is one of the most important English-language philosophers at work today; he is also unique in the philosophical community in applying his ideas on language and epistemology to social theory and political problems. In this book Taylor brings together some of his best essays, including "Overcoming Epistemology," "The Validity of Transcendental Argument," "Irreducibly Social Goods," and "The Politics of Recognition." As usual, his arguments are trenchant, straddling the length and breadth of contemporary philosophy and public discourse.

The strongest theme running through the book is Taylor's critique of disengagement, instrumental reason, and atomism: that individual instances of knowledge, judgment, discourse, or action cannot be intelligible in abstraction from the outside world. By developing his arguments about the importance of "engaged agency," Taylor simultaneously addresses themes in philosophical debate and in a broader discourse of political theory and cultural studies. The thirteen essays in this collection reflect most of the concerns with which he has been involved throughout his career--language, ideas of the self, political participation, the nature of modernity. His intellectual range is extraordinary, as is his ability to clarify what is at stake in difficult philosophical disputes. Taylor's analyses of liberal democracy, welfare economics, and multiculturalism have real political significance, and his voice is distinctive and wise.

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Lavishly illustrated, Exploring Music: The Science and Technology of Tones and Tunes explains in a nonmathematical way the underlying science of music, musical instruments, tones, and tunes. The author explores the magical quality and science of music, facilitating pleasure and the understanding in both young and older readers. Based primarily on the highly successful series of Christmas lectures given by the author in 1989-1990 at the Royal Institution, this book contains an expanded version of what he demonstrated to live audiences in excess of 2,000 as well as over 10 million television viewers. ... Read more

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Very Good overview of the science behind music
I bought this book after it was reviewed in "The New Scientist" and I certainly wasn't dissapointed. It's very well organised and even though quite thin, it covers everything in requisite depth. For e.g. hedoes a great job on explaining the origin of the currently used scales etc. ... Read more

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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 offer 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: philosophy and the modern self; the problem of secularization; between liberalism and communitarianism; and, language, literature and culture. ... Read more

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The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is a key figure in contemporary debates about the self and the problems of modernity.


This book provides a comprehensive, critical account of Taylor's work. It succinctly reconstructs the ambitious philosophical project that unifies Taylor's diverse writings. And it examines in detail Taylor's specific claims about the structure of the human sciences; the link between identity, language, and moral values; democracy and multiculturalism; and the conflict between secular and non-secular spirituality. The book also includes the first sustained account of Taylor's career as a social critic and political activist.


Clearly written and authoritative, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, politics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and theology. ... Read more

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excellent clear introduction
This book is an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Charles Taylor and his contributions to various current debates in philosophy and political theory, such as the politics of recognition, multiculturalismetc. It is comprehensive and very clearly written. ... Read more

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This is the first comprehensive evaluation of Charles Taylor's work and a major contribution to the leading questions in philosophy and the human sciences as they face an increasingly pluralistic age. Charles Taylor is one of the most influential moral and political philosophers of our time, and these essays address topics in his thought ranging over the history of philosophy, truth, modernity and postmodernity, theism, interpretation, the human sciences, liberalism, pluralism and difference. ... Read more

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Can a democratic society treat all its members as equals and also recognize their specific cultural identities? Should it try to ensure the survival of specific cultural groups? Is political recognition of ethnicity or gender essential to a person's dignity? These are some of the questions at the heart of the political controversy over multiculturalism and recognition - a debate that has raged across academic departments, university campuses, ethnic and feminist associations, and governments throughout the world. In this book, Charles Taylor offers a historically informed, philosophical perspective on what is at stake in the demand made by many people for recognition of their particular group identities by public institutions. His thoughts serve as a point of departure for commentaries which further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism and cultural separatism. ... Read more

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The reader will discover the beginning of modern manufacturing operations and learn how Taylor continues to influence today's manufacturing systems. Frederick W. Taylor shows the reader how to apply his theories and achieve manufacturing excellence. ... Read more

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Cheaper by the dozens - a story of piece work
In "Frederick W. Taylor: The Father of Scientific Management - Myth and Reality" [1991] Taylor comes across as a son of the upper class, traipsing from one consultant engagement to another, stop watch in hand [or later on, stop watch somehow disguised so as not to upset the floor workers], a little humorous in his actions as he mucked about as something of an anthropologist going into the lost world of factories and loading docks.

I will always have a warm feeling for Taylor, who was played as a daft old clock-watcher with a ticker of gold by Clifton Webb in "Cheaper by the Dozen" -- that Saturday Night at the Movies perennial. The focus on the Frederick W. Taylor of Hollywood was different. It was on his home life, with a raft of children, and his attempts to bring Scientific Management to the home nest. The straightest path to job completion was his goal; the breakup of the job into streamlined tasks was his means. One recalls Webb deciding that the optimal way to button a man's vest was starting at the bottom and moving up.Brilliant!

Some of his critics pointed to Babbage and Coulomb as progenitors of time-study, but Taylor can place a fair claim on having invented it in 1881 as he studied the Mivale Steel Company lading process.

Was it really science? The evidence as I read it in this book by Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G Greenwood is that there was lot of pseudo science in Taylor's work, and a bit of fudging here and there. But he was on to something, and his followers, some of whom used that new invention, moving pictures, to break down and improve processes. Place Frank Gilbreth, author of "Cheaper by the Dozen," in this camp.

The book covers a lot of ground, but doesn't dig in much and analyze. For example, the Watertown Arsenal Strike of 1911, which was set off by workers less than enamored of piece work as promulgated by a Taylor protégé, is a pretty significant event, but it gets short shrift here. The book is really like a document, laying out the facts of Taylor's public life, and would thus be valuable to researchers, but the dust jacket promotion of the book as of value to the managers who would have interest in Drucker is not quite germane, in my opinion. The facts sometime seem to dispel some myth - but the work is that of an investigator who leaves it to the client to infer and conclude.
... Read more