Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher whose work spans philosophy of mind, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. A leading critic of atomistic liberalism, he has argued throughout his career that the self is fundamentally constituted by social relationships and moral frameworks, and cannot be understood in isolation from the background of significance against which it moves.

Sources of the Self traced the historical formation of modern identity through the moral frameworks—theistic, naturalist, and expressive-Romantic—that make modern life meaningful. A Secular Age examined why belief in God moved from being virtually unavoidable in 1500 to being one option among many today. Taylor draws on Hegel, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein to construct a hermeneutical alternative to reductive naturalism, insisting that human sciences require a richer language than natural science can provide.