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
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... perhaps get at the point of these questions in the following way . Questions along the second axis can arise for people in any culture . Someone in a warrior society might ask whether his tale of courageous deeds lives up to the promise ...
... Perhaps the most important form of this ethic today is the ideal of altruism . With the decline of the specifically theological definition of the nature of a transformed will , a formulation of the crucial distinction of higher and ...
... perhaps turn out one day not to hold for some exceptional individual or new type , some superman of disengaged objectification . Rather the claim is that living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency ...
... perhaps we could put the question this way : What induces us to talk about moral orientation in terms of the question , Who are we ? This second formulation points us towards the fact that we haven't always done so . Talk about ...
... perhaps be put this way : the idea that we invent distinctions out of whole cloth is equivalent to the notion that we invent the questions as well as the answers . We all think of some issues as factitious in this sense . To take 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 |