Charles Taylor: A Strong Evaluator

(published in German in the magazine Transit for Charles Taylor’s 85th birthday  alongside papers by Habermas, Fraser, Joas, MacIntyre, Gutmann, Honneth, etc.)

 

In seminal essays such as “What is Human Agency?” and Part 1 of Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor tried to articulate a fuller notion of selfhood and personal identity than those available in the analytic tradition. He starts off by suggesting that stripped-down, Lockean conceptions of personal identity as self-awareness through time could not be the end of the story. The idea, for instance, that “identity over time just involves […] psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity” is omitting, according to Charles, a crucial feature of what it is to be a person.

 

Even Harry Frankfurt’s richer theory of personhood lacks, according to Charles, a layer. For Frankfurt, what makes us distinctively human is our capacity to have “second-order volitions”, which involves being capable of rationally evaluating our first-order desires.… Continue reading