Charles Taylor

I taught this course at New Mexico Tech in 1996.  I put the pages 
here to possibly help those beginning to read Charles Taylor's work.
What you want are the links at the bottom. 


Texts

Philosophy & the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2
Philosophical Arguments
 

See Prof. William Hughes' bibliography at: http://www.netidea.com/~whughes/taylor.html

Who is Charles Taylor?

Charles Taylor is a professor of Philosophy at McGill University . The department finally put up a short webpage for Prof. Taylor.  For many years he was a professor of Social & Political Theory at Oxford University.  He is the author of many books, including a standard technical work on Hegel.  Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is a famous book appealing to a general academic readership.  Three features make Taylor an attractive choice for non-majors. 

First, Taylor writes much of his work for a general academic audience, instead of for a highly specialized audience of philosophy professors & graduate students. Academic philosophic writing is highly allusive. Typically an author will refer to many works to explain an idea. Few readers will have read all the texts the author alludes to, but unless a reader is familiar with the core texts that the author refers to, she is not likely to get much from the essay, or to even be much interested in it. Majoring in philosophy is largely a process of critically reading core texts that historically define the discipline.  Although Taylor does allude to both primary & secondary works, his allusions are illustrative. He does not allude to works merely to show his erudition. His work is highly readable and non-technical. 
The second attraction of Taylor's work has to do with his choice of popular & nontechnical topics. In the works we will read, Taylor examines questions about social philosophy and about contemporary American political theory. 
Taylor is a major contemporary philosopher. 

#1: "Overcoming Epistemology"
  #2: "The Validity of Transcendental Arguments"
  #3: "Explanation & Practical Reason" (T. Kuhn) 
  #4: "Heidegger & Wittgenstein"
  #5: "The Importance of Herder" (the linguistic turn; origins of language) 
  #6: "Heidegger, Language, & Ecology"  
       perhaps the best essay in this collection) 
  #7: "Irreducibly Social Goods" (liberal social theory) 
#8: skip 
  #9: "To Follow a Rule" (Wittgenstein & pragmatic epistemology) 
  #10: "Cross-Purposes: The Liberal--Communitarian Debate" 
       (Bentham vs. Ed. Burke) 
  #11: "Invoking Civil Society"  
       (11, 13 & 12 are related; I preferred this order) 
  #12: "The Politics of Recognition" (perhaps the 2nd best essay here) 
  #13: "Liberal Politics & the Public Sphere

  #1: "Interpretation & the Sciences of Man"
  #3: "Social Theory as Practice"
  #4: "Understanding & Ethnocentricity"
  #6: "Foucault on Freedom & Truth"
  #10: "Legitimation Crisis?"