AMONG A SMALL BUT VOCAL SUBSET of readers, the arrival of a new doorstopper on poetry and philosophy by Canadian thinker Charles Taylor is liable to induce swooning.
For at least fifteen years, other thinkers have been describing him as an “elder statesman” of English-speaking philosophy, and his broadly synthesizing, historically detailed arguments in works such as Sources of the Self and A Secular Age have become touchstones on some of the great themes of modern thought: language, political identity, religion and secularism, selfhood, and the notions of authenticity and representation in multicultural democracies. Taylor’s work stands alongside that of the most abstruse and forbidding continental theorists. But his own style is lucid (if longwinded), and his insights are accessible to anyone willing to put in a bit of old-fashioned intellectual labor.
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