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
Results 6-10 of 82
... earlier ages , the reasoning might run , when the major definition of our existential predicament was one in which we feared above all condemnation , where an unchallengeable framework made imperious demands on us , it is understandable ...
... earlier ages . For most of us , certain fundamental moral questions are still put in universal terms : those , for instance , which we stated in section 1.1 , dealing with people's rights to life and integrity . What differentiates us ...
... earlier , more " primitive " form of immersion in community not just because the second is necessarily ontogenetically prior , and not even just because the first stance can never be adopted across the whole range of thought and ...
... earlier in human history . And in a sense this is true . Certainly earlier formulations of the issue of this second axis invoke some larger reality we should connect with : in some earlier religions , a cosmic reality ; in Jewish ...
... earlier , say , pre- adolescent self as another person and , similarly , to consider what " I " ( as we normally put it ) shall be several decades in the future as still another person . This whole position draws on the Lockean ...
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 |