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. |
From inside the book
... thought , our epistemology and our philosophy of language , largely without our awareness . Doctrines which are supposedly derived from the sober examination of some domain into which the self doesn't and shouldn't obtrude actually ...
... thought and description which have misguidedly been made to seem prob- lematic . In particular , what I want to bring out and examine is the richer background languages in which we set the basis and point of the moral obligations we ...
... thought to lack souls , or to be not fully rational , or perhaps to be destined by God for some lower station , or something of the sort . So our moral reactions in this domain have two facets , as it were . On one side , they are ...
... thought to encompass just our obligations to other people . But if we adopt this definition , then we have to allow that there are other questions beyond the moral which are of central concern to us , and which bring strong evaluation ...
... thought and sensibility about what is incompara- bly higher in life . Real dedication to others or to the universal good wins our admiration and even in signal cases our awe . The crucial quality which commands our respect here is a ...
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 |