Description
Book SynopsisTaylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds the affirmation of ordinary life, a value that has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth.
Trade ReviewTaylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live…and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader. To have accomplished so much is an important philosophical achievement. -- Martha Nussbaum * New Republic *
Sources of the Self is in every sense a large book: in length and in the range of what it covers, but above all in the generosity and breadth of its sympathies and its interest in humanity… Few books on such large subjects are so engaging. -- Bernard Williams * New York Review of Books *
A magnificent account, full, fair, well read, well written, complicated and high spirited—a credit, one might say, to the modern self that is capable of plumbing the depths of its own heritage in such a generous way. -- Jeremy Waldron * Times Literary Supplement *
For sociologists, there is no more important philosopher writing in the world today than Charles Taylor. -- Alan Wolfe * Contemporary Sociology *
Undoubtedly one of the most significant works in moral philosophy and the history of ideas to appear in recent decades. -- Frances S. Adeney * Theology Today *
Surely one of the most important philosophical works of the last quarter of a century. -- Jerome Bruner
Table of ContentsPreface PART I Identity and the Good 1. Inescapable Frameworks 2. The Self in Moral Space 3. Ethics of Inarticulacy 4. Moral Sources PART II Inwardness 5. Moral Topography 6. Plato's Self-Mastery 7. "In Interiore Homine" 8. Descartes's Disengaged Reason 9. Locke's Punctual Self 10. Exploring "l'Humaine Condition" 11. Inner Nature 12. A Digression on Historical Explanation PART III The Affirmation of Ordinary Life 13. "God Loveth Adverbs" 14. Rationalized Christianity 15. Moral Sentiments 16. The Providential Order 17. The Culture of Modernity PART IV The Voice of Nature 18. Fractured Horizons 19. Radical Enlightenment 20. Nature as Source 21. The Expressivist Turn PART V Subtler Languages 22. Our Victorian Contemporaries 23. Visions of the Post-Romantic Age 24. Epiphanies of Modernism 25. Conclusion: The Conflicts of Modernity Notes Index
