Charles Taylor

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Times Literary Supplement Book of the YearA Globe and Mail Best Book of the YearA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the YearA Tablet Best Book of the YearWinner of a Christianity Today Book Award“One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society.” —The EconomistWhat does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we—in the West, at least—largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean—of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others. Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in “Western Christendom” of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today’s secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion—although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined—but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations. What this means for the world—including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence—is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

“Charles Taylor is a philosopher of broad reach and many talents, but his most striking talent is a gift for interpreting different traditions, cultures and philosophies to one another…[This book is] full of good things.” —New York Times Book ReviewEverywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity’s challenges.“The great merit of Taylor’s brief, non-technical, powerful book…is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social…Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people…The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture—no matter how vicious or stupid.”—Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

This exceptional translation of Pirke Avot (Pirkei Avot) features in full the chapters and sacred phrases by the Jewish forefathers. This edition is in hardcover. Pirke Avot or Pirkei Avot - in English 'Chapters of the Fathers' - is a collection of sayings and aphorisms dating from antiquity which teach the ethics and morality of the Jewish faith. Attributed to various sages of Judaism who taught between the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century AD, this collection combines some of the finest and most salient phrases coined by the revered rabbis of old. Since the early Middle Ages, it has been customary in several Jewish traditions for adherents and aspiring rabbis to devote time studying and absorbing these ancient sayings. Many are characterised by a memorable brevity, for expressing in a couple of sentences what other teachers would find difficult to teach in several pages. The Jewish principles of kindness, self-respect and the respect of others are expounded upon with insightful detail.

This exceptional translation of Pirke Avot (Pirkei Avot) features in full the chapters and sacred phrases by the Jewish forefathers. Pirke Avot or Pirkei Avot - in English 'Chapters of the Fathers' - is a collection of sayings and aphorisms dating from antiquity which teach the ethics and morality of the Jewish faith. Attributed to various sages of Judaism who taught between the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century AD, this collection combines some of the finest and most salient phrases coined by the revered rabbis of old. Since the early Middle Ages, it has been customary in several Jewish traditions for adherents and aspiring rabbis to devote time studying and absorbing these ancient sayings. Many are characterised by a memorable brevity, for expressing in a couple of sentences what other teachers would find difficult to teach in several pages. The Jewish principles of kindness, self-respect and the respect of others are expounded upon with insightful detail.

The Bible reveals much about angels; however, as it is with other subject matters in the Bible, the subject of angels could be treated superficially with its deeper truths overlooked or missed. This book does not attempt to address all there is to angels but intends to uncover profound truths about angels, which otherwise have remained obscured. Many may resist the thought of angels possessing physical bodies, let alone the possibility of them engaging in sexual activities. What really is the image of God, and do angels possess that? This book addresses these questions and other intriguing facts about angels. The inevitable topic of man is also treated in limit, perhaps you would like to know how and where Adam and his wife, Eve, were created. I hope you appreciate and come to the realization of the possibilities of what this book offers in the light of scriptures.

“We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human.” —John Cottingham, The TabletIn seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation. Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

This rich study explores the elements of Hegel's social and political thought that are most relevant to our society today. Combating the prevailing post-World War II stereotype of Hegel as a proto-fascist, Charles Taylor argues that Hegel aimed not to deny the rights of individuality but to synthesise them with the intrinsic good of community membership. Hegel's goal of a society of free individuals whose social activity is expressive of who they are seems an even more distant goal now, and Taylor's discussion has renewed relevance for our increasingly globalised and industrialised society. This classic work is presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century with a specially commissioned new preface written by Frederick Neuhouser.

This rich study explores the elements of Hegel's social and political thought that are most relevant to our society today. Combating the prevailing post-World War II stereotype of Hegel as a proto-fascist, Charles Taylor argues that Hegel aimed not to deny the rights of individuality but to synthesise them with the intrinsic good of community membership. Hegel's goal of a society of free individuals whose social activity is expressive of who they are seems an even more distant goal now, and Taylor's discussion has renewed relevance for our increasingly globalised and industrialised society. This classic work is presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century with a specially commissioned new preface written by Frederick Neuhouser.

“Compact and engaging, Retrieving Realism is more approachable than its weighty subject matter might predict…[An] adventurous combination of arguments and mixing of philosophical cultures.” —Boston Review“A picture held us captive,” writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe. According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This “mediational” epistemology—internal ideas mediating external reality—continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it—by handling things, moving among them, responding to them—and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes’s privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared. Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with—trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations—fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.