Yesterday, Librarian of Congress James Billington announced that philosophers Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas would share this year’s $1.5 million John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. At the announcement, Billington described Charles Taylor as “a philosopher of extraordinary eminence … His writings reveal astonishing breadth and depth, ranging across subjects as diverse as metaphysics, modern culture, human conduct and behaviour, modernization and the place of religion in a secular age. He writes with a lucidity that makes his work accessible to the non-specialist reader, ensuring that his contributions to our understanding of agency, freedom, spirituality and the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities will be of lasting import.”
Want to know more about Taylor’s work? UTP has you covered.
- Paul Saurette’s book The Kantian Imperative: Humiliation, Common Sense, Politics, compares Taylor’s and Habermas’s work in connection with Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy.
- Brian J. Braman’s Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Authentic Human Existence (now in paperback!) connects Taylor to the work of the famous Jesuit theologian, while Michael Temelini’s Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics includes a chapter on the similarities between Taylor’s philosophy and Wittgenstein’s dialogical approach.
- Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report collects responses to the report on “reasonable accommodation” which Taylor co-authored with sociologist and historian Gérard Bouchard. For more on the report’s philosophy of interculturalism, you can read the English edition of his Bouchard’s Interculturalism, to which Taylor contributed a foreword.
- Last, but certainly not least, you can read some of Taylor’s book The Malaise of Modernity in The Development of Political Thought in Canada: An Anthology, edited by Kathrine Fierlbeck.
Happy Reading!