Dilemmas and Connections

by Taylor, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780674055322
• ISBN10: 0674055322
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-07
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

There are, always, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in oners"s philosophy-and in these essays Charles Taylor turns to those things not fully imagined or avenues not wholly explored in his epochal A Secular Age . Here Taylor talks in detail about thinkers who are his allies and interlocutors, such as Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Brandom, and Paul Celan. He offers major contributions to social theory, expanding on the issues of nationalism, democratic exclusionism, religious mobilizations, and modernity. And he delves even more deeply into themes taken up in A Secular Age: the continuity of religion from the past into the future; the nature of the secular; the folly of hoping to live by "reason alone"; the perils of moralism. He also speculates on how irrationality emerges from the heart of rationality itself, and why violence breaks out again and again.In A Secular Age, Taylor more evidently foregrounded his Catholic faith, and there are several essays here that further explore that faith. Overall, this is a hopeful book, showing how, while acknowledging the force of religion and the persistence of violence and folly, we nonetheless have the power to move forward once we have given up the brittle pretensions of a narrow rationalism.

Table of Contents

Allies and Interlocutors
Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy	p. 3
Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes	p. 24
Language Not Mysterious?	p. 39
Celan and the Recovery of Language	p. 56
Social Theory
Nationalism and Modernity	p. 81
Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights	p. 105
Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?)	p. 124
Religious Mobilizations	p. 146
Themes from A Secular Age
A Catholic Modernity?	p. 167
Notes on the Sources of Violence: Perennial and Modern	p. 188
The Future of the Religious Past	p. 214
Disenchantment-Reenchantment	p. 287
What Does Secularism Mean?	p. 303
Die Blosse Vernunft (ôReason Aloneö)	p. 326
Perils of Moralism	p. 347
What Was the Axial Revolution?	p. 367
Notes	p. 381
Credits	p. 407
Index	p. 409
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