Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern IdentityIn this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. |
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... common with moral issues , and what deserves the vague term ' spiritual ' , is that they all involve what I have called elsewhere ' strong evaluation ' , 2 that is , they involve discriminations of right or wrong , better or worse ...
... common status as God's creatures ; others would reject this for a purely secular account and perhaps invoke the dignity of rational life . But beyond this , articulating any particular person's background can be subject to controversy ...
... common to them all is the sense that no framework is shared by everyone , can be taken for granted as the framework tout court , can sink to the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact . This basic understanding refracts ...
... common in our time which push people in this direction . I hope to explain this more clearly below . But just as with the ontological claims above underlying our respect for life , this radical reduction cannot be carried through . To ...
... common by the term ' incomparable ' . In each of these cases , the sense is that there are ends or goods which are worthy or desirable in a way that cannot be measured on the same scale as our ordinary ends , goods , desirabilia . They ...
Contents
3 | |
41 | |
53 | |
Moral Sources PART II | 105 |
Inwardness | 109 |
Moral Topography | 111 |
Platos SelfMastery | 115 |
In Interiore Homine | 127 |
The Culture of Modernity | 285 |
Fractured Horizons | 305 |
Nature as Source | 355 |
The Expressivist Turn | 368 |
Our Victorian Contemporaries | 405 |
Visions of the PostRomantic | 419 |
Epiphanies of Modernism | 456 |
The Conflicts of Modernity | 495 |
Descartess Disengaged Reason | 143 |
Lockes Punctual Self | 159 |
Exploring lHumaine Condition | 177 |
Inner Nature | 185 |
A Digression on Historical Explanation | 199 |
PART III | 209 |
God Loveth Adverbs | 211 |
Rationalized Christianity | 234 |
Moral Sentiments | 248 |
The Providential Order | 269 |
3 | 539 |
25 | 541 |
53 | 551 |
91 | 568 |
III | 573 |
127 | 582 |
143 | 585 |
185 | 596 |
211 | 599 |