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 79
... language and other forms of expression . More and more , we moderns attain meaning in the first sense , when we do , through creating it in the second sense . The problem of the meaning of life is therefore on our agenda , however much ...
... language is historically conditioned . But there is a sense of the term where we speak of people as selves , meaning that they are beings of the requisite depth and complexity to have an identity in the above sense ( or to be struggling ...
... language we have come to accept articulates the issues of the good for us . But we cannot have fully articulated what we are taking as given , what we are simply counting with , in using this language . We can , of course , try to ...
... language only exists and is maintained within a language community . And this indicates another crucial feature of a self . One is a self only among other selves . A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it ...
... language of discernment at all , without the conversations which fix this language for him . This is the sense in which one cannot be a self on one's own . I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors : in one way in relation ...
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 |