Charles Taylor

Early Life and Education

Charles Margrave Taylor was born on November 5, 1931, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to a bilingual family (English-speaking father, French-speaking mother). This bicultural upbringing in a multicultural society profoundly shaped his lifelong concern with questions of identity, recognition, and pluralism.

Taylor studied history and political science at McGill University before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned his D.Phil. under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin and Elizabeth Anscombe. At Oxford, he engaged deeply with the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition while also immersing himself in Continental philosophy — Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger — creating a synthesis unusual among English-language philosophers.

The Explanation of Behaviour and Hermeneutic Philosophy

The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), Taylor's first major work, challenged the behaviorist account of human action, arguing that teleological (purpose-directed) explanation is indispensable and irreducible to mechanistic causal explanation. This defense of hermeneutic over naturalistic social science became a recurring theme.

Hegel and the History of Philosophy

Hegel (1975) and Hegel and Modern Society (1979) provided influential interpretations that made Hegel accessible to English-speaking audiences. Taylor emphasized Hegel's communitarian insights: that individuals are constituted by their social and cultural contexts and that freedom requires recognition by and participation in a community — themes that would become central to Taylor's own philosophy.

Sources of the Self (1989)

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) is Taylor's philosophical masterpiece. It traces the historical emergence of the distinctively modern sense of selfhood — characterized by inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and the ideal of authenticity — from its roots in Augustine's inward turn, through the Reformation's sanctification of daily life, Descartes' disengaged reason, the Romantic expressivism of Herder and the Romantics, and the modernist confrontation with meaninglessness.

Taylor argued that the modern self draws on multiple, often conflicting "moral sources" — theism, Enlightenment reason, Romantic expressivism — and that acknowledging this plurality is essential to understanding our moral predicament. He also argued against "subtraction narratives" that picture modernity as simply the removal of religion, proposing instead that secularization involves a transformation of the conditions of belief.

A Secular Age (2007)

A Secular Age (2007) is Taylor's most ambitious work: an 874-page history of secularization in the Latin West. Taylor asks why it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 and entirely possible in 2000. His answer rejects both simple "subtraction stories" (religion just fades as reason advances) and purely sociological explanations. Instead, Taylor traces how the "conditions of belief" changed through a series of historical transformations: the disenchantment of the world, the creation of "buffered" selves impervious to spiritual forces, the Nova effect (the multiplication of spiritual options), and the emergence of an "immanent frame" within which both belief and unbelief become live options.

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition

"The Politics of Recognition" (1994) argued that modern democratic politics must grapple with the demand for recognition — the acknowledgment of the distinctive identity of cultural, ethnic, and religious groups. Misrecognition or nonrecognition can be a form of oppression, and liberal democracies must find ways to accommodate cultural difference without abandoning universal principles of equal dignity.

Taylor has held positions at McGill University for most of his career and has been awarded the Templeton Prize, the Kyoto Prize, and the Berggruen Prize, among many others.