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Philosophical Arguments
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 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.
The strongest theme running through the book is Taylor's critique of disengagement, instrumental reason, and 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.
- GenresPhilosophy
336 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 1995
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221 people want to read
About the author
Charles Margrave Taylor
151 books658 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
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October 19, 2024
THE ESTEEMED PHILOSOPHER LOOKS AT EPISTEMOLOGY, AND ETHICS
Charles Margrave Taylor (born 1931) is a Canadian philosopher who taught at Oxford and McGill University; he is also a practicing Roman Catholic.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, "This collection of essays may appear rather disparate. In some ways it is, since the principle of selection was partly temporal: most of what appears here was written in the last ten years. But there are nevertheless some basic themes that recur… These themes have been bothering me for decades… The oldest theme in this sense is the one I deal with head on in the very first essay, ‘Overcoming Epistemology.’ … Various other papers in the volume follow out of ramifications of this debate with epistemology… here we come to the point of overlap with a second theme that has concerned me over the years: the nature of language.”
In the first chapter, he says, “Richard Rorty’s influential book 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' helped both to crystallize and to accelerate a trend toward the repudiation of the whole epistemological enterprise… The heart of the old epistemology was the belief in a foundational enterprise. What the positive sciences needed to complete them, on this view, was a rigorous discipline that could check the credentials of all truth claims… If we follow this description, then it is clear what overcoming epistemology has to mean. It will mean abandoning fundamentalism.” (Pg. 2)
He ends the second chapter, “Transcendental arguments thus turn out to be quite paradoxical things… They prove something quite strong about the subject of experience and the subject’s place in the world… They articulate a grasp of the point of our activity which we cannot but have, and their formulations aspire to self-evidence, and yet they must articulate what is most difficult for us to articulate, and so they are open to endless debate. A valid transcendental argument in indubitable; yet it is hard to know when you have one, at least one with an interesting conclusion. But then that seems true of most arguments in philosophy.” (Pg. 33)
He says in the 5th chapter about Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), “This losing sight of origins can be of more than historiographical significance. It may also be that we still have something important to learn from the original statement of certain foundational ideas that has yet to be captured in recognized ‘philosophical’ formulations. I think this is true of another one of Herder’s crucial contributions, his expressivist theory of language.
'My (perhaps overdramatic) claim is that Herder is the hinge figure who originates a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and meaning. This way has had a tremendous impact on modern culture. It has not quite swept all before it, since there are important segments of contemporary thought which resist these insights, but even they have been transformed in ways that can be traced to the Herder revolution.” (Pg. 79) But later, he admits, “This is not to say that he want all the way to this retrieval. On the contrary, he often failed to draw the conclusions implicit in the new perspective he adopted---but he did play a crucial role in opening up this perspective.” (Pg. 90)
He notes, “As a philosophical doctrine, welfarism is acting as a screen, which prevents us from seeing out actual moral predicament and from identifying the real alternatives. It pretends to a neutrality it doesn’t really enjoy. The result is that it distorts its opponent and, perhaps even more forcefully, hides from itself the rich moral outlook that motivates it. To set it aside is more than a demand of intellectual rigor. It is also a requirement of political and moral lucidity. And this is why is it worth showing to all sides in the debate that there are, indeed, irreducibly social goods.” (Pg. 145)
He concludes the 11th chapter with the statement, “The choice seems to lie between a view of civil society almost exclusively concerned with the L-stream [i.e., “society as an extrapolitical reality”] and one that tries to balance both. In the first category fall those critics of corporatist politics on the right who aim to roll back the power of the state. In the second are found the contemporary followers of Tocqueville, some of whom along with a bewilderingly diverse variety of utopians end up on the ecological left, but who are also found near the center of many western societies.
"I hope an impression has emerged that the second view, which balances both streams, is greatly superior to the first; more, that the first is in constant danger of falling victim to the simpler formulas of a prepolitical freedom that end up subverting the distinction or neutralizing its force as a counter-thrust to bureaucratic power. In any case, this is what I propose.” (Pg. 224)
In the 12th chapter, he states, “All this is to say that liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim complete cultural neutrality. Liberalism is also a fighting creed. The hospitable variant I espouse, as well as the most rigid forms, has to draw the line. There will be variations when it comes to applying the schedule of rights, but not where incitement to assassination is concerned. This shouldn’t be seen as a contradiction. Substantive distinctions of this kind are inescapable in politics, and at least the nonprocedural liberalism I was describing is fully ready to accept this.” (Pg. 249)
This book will be of keen interest to anyone studying Taylor’s thought and its development.
Charles Margrave Taylor (born 1931) is a Canadian philosopher who taught at Oxford and McGill University; he is also a practicing Roman Catholic.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, "This collection of essays may appear rather disparate. In some ways it is, since the principle of selection was partly temporal: most of what appears here was written in the last ten years. But there are nevertheless some basic themes that recur… These themes have been bothering me for decades… The oldest theme in this sense is the one I deal with head on in the very first essay, ‘Overcoming Epistemology.’ … Various other papers in the volume follow out of ramifications of this debate with epistemology… here we come to the point of overlap with a second theme that has concerned me over the years: the nature of language.”
In the first chapter, he says, “Richard Rorty’s influential book 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' helped both to crystallize and to accelerate a trend toward the repudiation of the whole epistemological enterprise… The heart of the old epistemology was the belief in a foundational enterprise. What the positive sciences needed to complete them, on this view, was a rigorous discipline that could check the credentials of all truth claims… If we follow this description, then it is clear what overcoming epistemology has to mean. It will mean abandoning fundamentalism.” (Pg. 2)
He ends the second chapter, “Transcendental arguments thus turn out to be quite paradoxical things… They prove something quite strong about the subject of experience and the subject’s place in the world… They articulate a grasp of the point of our activity which we cannot but have, and their formulations aspire to self-evidence, and yet they must articulate what is most difficult for us to articulate, and so they are open to endless debate. A valid transcendental argument in indubitable; yet it is hard to know when you have one, at least one with an interesting conclusion. But then that seems true of most arguments in philosophy.” (Pg. 33)
He says in the 5th chapter about Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), “This losing sight of origins can be of more than historiographical significance. It may also be that we still have something important to learn from the original statement of certain foundational ideas that has yet to be captured in recognized ‘philosophical’ formulations. I think this is true of another one of Herder’s crucial contributions, his expressivist theory of language.
'My (perhaps overdramatic) claim is that Herder is the hinge figure who originates a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and meaning. This way has had a tremendous impact on modern culture. It has not quite swept all before it, since there are important segments of contemporary thought which resist these insights, but even they have been transformed in ways that can be traced to the Herder revolution.” (Pg. 79) But later, he admits, “This is not to say that he want all the way to this retrieval. On the contrary, he often failed to draw the conclusions implicit in the new perspective he adopted---but he did play a crucial role in opening up this perspective.” (Pg. 90)
He notes, “As a philosophical doctrine, welfarism is acting as a screen, which prevents us from seeing out actual moral predicament and from identifying the real alternatives. It pretends to a neutrality it doesn’t really enjoy. The result is that it distorts its opponent and, perhaps even more forcefully, hides from itself the rich moral outlook that motivates it. To set it aside is more than a demand of intellectual rigor. It is also a requirement of political and moral lucidity. And this is why is it worth showing to all sides in the debate that there are, indeed, irreducibly social goods.” (Pg. 145)
He concludes the 11th chapter with the statement, “The choice seems to lie between a view of civil society almost exclusively concerned with the L-stream [i.e., “society as an extrapolitical reality”] and one that tries to balance both. In the first category fall those critics of corporatist politics on the right who aim to roll back the power of the state. In the second are found the contemporary followers of Tocqueville, some of whom along with a bewilderingly diverse variety of utopians end up on the ecological left, but who are also found near the center of many western societies.
"I hope an impression has emerged that the second view, which balances both streams, is greatly superior to the first; more, that the first is in constant danger of falling victim to the simpler formulas of a prepolitical freedom that end up subverting the distinction or neutralizing its force as a counter-thrust to bureaucratic power. In any case, this is what I propose.” (Pg. 224)
In the 12th chapter, he states, “All this is to say that liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim complete cultural neutrality. Liberalism is also a fighting creed. The hospitable variant I espouse, as well as the most rigid forms, has to draw the line. There will be variations when it comes to applying the schedule of rights, but not where incitement to assassination is concerned. This shouldn’t be seen as a contradiction. Substantive distinctions of this kind are inescapable in politics, and at least the nonprocedural liberalism I was describing is fully ready to accept this.” (Pg. 249)
This book will be of keen interest to anyone studying Taylor’s thought and its development.
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