Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T00:32:15.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Bashing the Enlightenment: A Discussion of Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Ronald de Sousa
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

This is a Big Book from one of Canada's preeminent philosophers. It aims at nothing less than to define what characterizes modernity, and then to tell us what is wrong with it. Like many a Big Book, it is predictably full of interesting things, and equally predictably disappointing, not to say feeble, in some of the central theses for which it argues. But then what more, in philosophy, can we really expect? It's what we tell our students: you don't have to be right, and you don't have to make me agree with you, but you do have to produce interesting arguments and show that you have thought seriously about the issues.

Type
Interventions/Discussions
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

de Beauvoir, Simone 1961 Les Mandarins. Paris: Schoenhof.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Dreyfus, S. 1986 Mind over Machine. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Maclntyre, Alistair 1989 Whose Justice, Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Rorty, Richard 1979 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1983 Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snell, Bruno 1960 The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks/Academy Library.Google Scholar
Symons, Donald 1979 The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1989 Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Toulmin, Stephen, and Goodfield, J. 1990 Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Wiggins, David R. P. 1976Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 62, 331378.Google Scholar
Wilson, Edmund O. 1978 On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google ScholarPubMed