Encounters with and impulses from Charles Taylor (original) (raw)

2018, Philosophy & Social Criticism

Among the more prominent contemporary philosophers I have known personally and repeatedly reference in my own work (Stanley Cavell, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Hilary Putnam), Charles Taylor was decisive to my own attempts to contribute to the differentiation of contemporary religious-philosophical discourse. When we first met at a workshop led by Jürgen Habermas at the Inter-University-Center in Dubrovnik in the late 1970s, "Philosophy and Social Sciences," I was, of course, unaware that Taylor was about to engage in extensive research on religious questions. We spent lunch discussing the merits and limitations of Habermasian theory, particularly with regard to certain intellectual impulses (not entirely acknowledged by Habermas), which can be derived from Hegel's work for the present day. I was intrigued by Taylor's argument that "in so far as this search for a situated subjectivity takes philosophical form, Hegel's thought will be one of its indispensable points of reference." 1 One outcome of this initial contact was a presentation on "Charles Taylor's Hegelian critique of 'mainstream analytical philosophy'," 2 which I delivered at the 3rd Congress of the Societas Hegeliana at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre in 1988. This talk dealt with the question of how Taylor's "qualitative concept of action" could be positioned against misappropriations thereof in the Davidsonian "theory of action" and in "artificial intelligence theory." 3 While participating in the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association on Prince Edward Island in the early 1990s, I became aware of the book The Malaise of Modernity-Taylor's Massey Lectures, soon republished by Harvard under the title The Ethics of Authenticity. I managed to finish the book in a single reading on the sidelines of the conference. Most impressive about Taylor's analysis of modernity was the complexity of his argumentation. On the one hand, Taylor stresses that "the effective re-enframing of technology" necessitates political action "to reverse the drift that market

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