Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern IdentityIn this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. |
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... whole range of issues involved in the attempt to live the best possible life , and this not only among professional philoso- phers , but with a wider public . So much of my effort in Part I will be directed towards enlarging our range ...
... whole human race . Should anybody propose to do so , we should immediately ask what distinguished those within from those left out . And we should seize on this distinguishing characteristic in order to show that it had nothing to do ...
... whole human species . What is peculiar to the modern West among such higher civilizations is that its favoured formulation for this principle of respect has come to be in terms of rights . This has become central to our legal systems ...
... whole understanding of what it is truly to respect human life and integrity . Along with the central place given to autonomy , it defines a version of this demand which is peculiar to our civilization , the modern West . 1.4 Thus far I ...
... whole society in the modern West . This term ' horizon ' is the one that is frequently used to make this point . What Weber called ' disenchantment ' , the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order , has allegedly ...
Contents
3 | |
41 | |
53 | |
Moral Sources PART II | 105 |
Inwardness | 109 |
Moral Topography | 111 |
Platos SelfMastery | 115 |
In Interiore Homine | 127 |
The Culture of Modernity | 285 |
Fractured Horizons | 305 |
Nature as Source | 355 |
The Expressivist Turn | 368 |
Our Victorian Contemporaries | 405 |
Visions of the PostRomantic | 419 |
Epiphanies of Modernism | 456 |
The Conflicts of Modernity | 495 |
Descartess Disengaged Reason | 143 |
Lockes Punctual Self | 159 |
Exploring lHumaine Condition | 177 |
Inner Nature | 185 |
A Digression on Historical Explanation | 199 |
PART III | 209 |
God Loveth Adverbs | 211 |
Rationalized Christianity | 234 |
Moral Sentiments | 248 |
The Providential Order | 269 |
3 | 539 |
25 | 541 |
53 | 551 |
91 | 568 |
III | 573 |
127 | 582 |
143 | 585 |
185 | 596 |
211 | 599 |