When I was younger I felt I could read moral philosophy and epistemology until the cows came home. I am forever curious about the state of reality and humankind’s place it.

So I read this book with a little nostalgia about the years before I became tethered by familial and commercial responsibilities.

I wondered if I could still read philosophy.

This probably wasn’t a good book to start with. I have fond memories or reading an earlier work of Taylor. This voice was clear, his scholarship was profound.

In this book the scholarship gets a little carried away.

Too many references. Too many avenues of thought here.

I think the title of the book should have been “Sources of the Good.” He seems more concerned with where to find the good in people, and where people have been looking for it through the ages.

Don't tell my dissertation advisers that I hadn't read this before I finished- they might revoke my degree. On the other hand, they might say "well, you don't really need to read this unless you're a convinced naturalist/procedural ethicist/purveyor of socio-biology. Which you're not." And this is the problem. Like reading Wittgenstein when you're not already an analytic philosopher, this is only going to blow your mind if you haven't read any 20th century philosophy and are a little uncomfortable with your Lockean beliefs. If you're comfortable with them, you'll shrug and say who gives a toss.

The first 4 chapters look at late 20th century anglo-philosophical ethics, basically, stuff that follows from utilitarianism, Rawls or Nozick. Oddly, it's much more interesting than the following 21 chapters. CT is better when he's engaging with arguments, rather than when he's laying out his tremendous analysis of the modern self over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, all in slightly different permutations, and all strictly obeying the rule of three. There are three characteristics of *everything*. He nearly slips up when counting the 'frontiers of modern ethical thought;' on page 317 he tells us there are two of them... by 319 he's come to his senses and added in a third. Phew! Close call. He then reverts, still on 319, back to the claim that there are two. Do we have an editor in the house?

Aside from being an execrable organizer of his own thought and a long-winded know-it-all, Taylor is quite readable. He thinks about important issues (e.g., just how important *is* the philosophical articulation of the self?) and is willing to take a stand or two: he rejects the twin ideas that we're contextless instrumental deciders, and that we're nothing. He's good on the importance of hermeneutics for understanding human life.

He's very bad, though, on separating his own axe-grinding from his historical work; although he claims to be giving us an interpretation of the modern self, there's an awful lot of judgement against rationalism, 'subjectivism,' and so on. This wouldn't matter if he didn't conclude that knowing about these sources of the self can 'empower' us to 'live this identity more fully'. Since he's almost without exception described our identity as bad, why empower us?
His readings of modernist texts are terrible; often there's no sign that he's even read the poems he describes. The same goes for many of the thinkers he discusses, most notably Adorno. Taylor has clearly read Habermas *on* Adorno, but that's like reading Obama's Goodreads review of Romney's book.

This all sounds bad, but chapters 1-4, 9, and 19-21 are well worth reading. Taylor's book is a cornerstone of much current philosophical thought, and deserves its reputation as a classic. But it needs an abridgement if people are going to keep reading it. ( )

100 TAY 2

Yesterday, early in the morning, I finished this book. This was a six month stint and it took a mighty effort just to finish it off, meaning that I lost much needed sleep in order to bring the reading to close and to the planned new one.
This is an incomplete Review as I will write one later as a proper Book Review (for a once through Reading) so I can do a remotely proper job of it. ( )