Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Charles Taylor's new essay collection


Dilemmas and Connections
Selected Essays

by Charles Taylor

(Belknap Press, 2011)

424 pages



Description


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.

Contents

1. Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy
2. Understanding the Other: a Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes
3. Language not Mysterious? [word]
4. Celan and the Recovery of Language
5. Nationalism and Modernity
6. Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights [pdf]
7. Democratic Exclusion (and its Remedies?)
8. Religious Mobilizations [excerpt]
9. Themes from a Secular Age
10. The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment
11. Notes on the Sources of Violence: Perennial and Modern
12. The Future of the Religious Past
13. Disenchantment-re-enchantment
14. What Does Secularism Mean?
15. Die blosse Vernunft ("Reason Alone")
16. Perils of Moralism
17. What was the Axial Revolution?

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of McGill University, Montreal. He is the author of "A Secular Age" (Harvard University Press, 2007).

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