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Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Human Agency and Language
Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences.
304 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 1985
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About the author
Charles Margrave Taylor
152 books662 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 7, 2021
Taylor's essays in this collection are masterful. He anticipates many later insights about language and action that were later developed by Brandom, McDowell, and MacIntyre.
April 17, 2024
I enjoy Taylor’s rich sense of what it means to be human, to make value judgments, to pursue goals, act on principles, interact with others, seek out beauty. There’s room for complexity, profundity, and mystery. In particular, his emphasis on how deeply cultural we are fits well with a sort of cultural evolutionary perspective that I've been interested in lately. At the same time, I’m not convinced by his persistent criticism of what he calls “naturalism,” here roughly the view that human beings can be satisfactorily studied using only the objective methodology so successful in natural science. When his objections are on point, I don't see why naturalism so understood would not be able to accommodate them. Of course, for Taylor these topics are deeply connected: we can only make room for this rich humanity if we reject naturalism. For my part, I instead hope we can combine them.
January 18, 2023
The star of these essays are found in Part one and the last two. I might even go so far as to say you must read them to grasp Taylor’s context truly, but also his work more generally.
Taylor is concerned with behaviorists and naturalists who want to reduce everything, whether the self, behavior or language, to mechanistic explanations. Taylor demonstrates how these are unsatisfactory by showing how we only make sense of the self in interpretation, which requires language and our relations. In other words, interpretation is always crucial in any discipline to stop its decline towards reductionism. Anyway, these are some brief thoughts off the top of my head.
93% The Self is only in the background
Taylor is concerned with behaviorists and naturalists who want to reduce everything, whether the self, behavior or language, to mechanistic explanations. Taylor demonstrates how these are unsatisfactory by showing how we only make sense of the self in interpretation, which requires language and our relations. In other words, interpretation is always crucial in any discipline to stop its decline towards reductionism. Anyway, these are some brief thoughts off the top of my head.
93% The Self is only in the background
October 19, 2024
A COLLECTION OF THE CANADIAN PHILOSOPHER’S PAPERS---MOSTLY ABOUT LANGUAGE
Charles Margrave Taylor (born 1931) is a Canadian philosopher who taught at Oxford and McGill University; he is also a practicing Roman Catholic.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1985 collection of papers, “Despite the appearance of variety in the papers published in this collection, they are the work of a monomaniac; or perhaps better, what Isaiah Berlin has called a hedgehog. If not a single idea, then at least a single rather tightly related agenda underlines all of them. If one had to find a name for where this agenda falls in the geography of philosophical domains, the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ would perhaps be best, although this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers uneasy. I started on it with a polemical concern.
"I wanted to argue against the understanding of human life and action implicit in an influential family of theories in the sciences of man. The common feature of this family is the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences. Theories of this kind seem to me terribly implausible. They lead to bad science: either they end up in wordy elaborations of the obvious, or they fail altogether to address the interesting questions, or their practitioners end up squandering their talents and ingenuity in the attempt to show that they can after all recapture the insights of ordinary life in their manifestly reductive explanatory languages.” (Pg. 1)
He continues, “Our personhood cannot be treated scientifically in exactly the same way we approach our organic being. What it is to possess a liver or a heart is something I can define quite independently of the space of questions in which I exist for myself, but not what it is to have a self or be a person. In any case, it is this thesis about the self that I aspire to make clearly and convincingly.” (Pg. 4)
He acknowledges, “the case for the ultimately moral grounding of modern naturalism needs to be made again, with more convincing argument and with finer moral discriminations. Having said this, I cannot claim to be very advanced in this task… But I think I see better than in the past what such a case would involve. Apart from the negative side of the argument, the case that naturalism makes a bad philosophy of science (which I think has been very powerfully made), the positive thesis can only be established in an historical account. This would have to show how, through the whole course of the development of the modern identity, the moral motivation has been intertwined with the epistemological, how the latter has never been a sufficient motive force but has always been seconded by the former…” (Pg. 7)
He adds, “So what I have to offer here is, alas, mainly promissory notes… I mentioned above that the idea account of the spiritual basis of modern naturalism should not only be very convincing as interpretation, but should also allow us to discriminate sensitively what we want to affirm and what we want to reject. But even before such an account has been worked out we can try to define more clearly the features of a modern identity, and the ideals which help constitute it, and offer a critique of them.” (Pg. 8)
He begins chapter 6 with the observation, “The kind of reflection which can be called philosophical cannot simply precede empirical discovery and lay out the field of the possible and the impossible. It can only be a reflection on empirical findings, raising questions about their interpretation, about the connections between them, about the problems they raise or help to solve. In this sense, ‘philosophy’ shades into the kind of reflection and discussion which any innovative empirical scientist must engage in. It can only be distinguished, if at all, in that we like to reserve the term for questions about the more fundamental issues.” (Pg. 139)
He concludes chapter 7, “mechanism is neither a certainty, as the sole metaphysic compatible with science, as its protagonists claim, nor is it inconceivable, and necessarily doomed to deny the undeniable, as some philosophers have argued. But in examining these invalid arguments, some clarity has been gained. What this examination seems to point toward is a dissolution of the alternative mechanism---dualism; it invites us to examine a non-dualistic conception of man which is nevertheless not linked with a reductivist notion of the sciences of man. This would, of course, involve an ontology with more than one level; in other words, it would mean that although some principles govern the behavior of all things, others apply only to some; and yet the latter cannot be shown as special cases of the former.” (Pg. 186)
He states, “We see language as a whole, as an activity with---potentially at least---a depth structure. The task is now to give an objective account of this depth structure and its operation, which underlies the activity of language we observe. This is now the agenda. In this the science of language is simply one example of a global shift in the objectivist sciences of man since the eighteenth century. The shift is away from a set of theories in terms of ‘surface’ or observable realities, principally the contents of the mind available to introspection, in favor of theories in terms of ‘deep’ or unobservable mechanisms or structures.” (Pg. 240-241)
He outlines, “I want to abstract from the various theories … three important aspects of language activity… These are three (mutually compatible) answers to the question: what are we bringing about in language and essentially through language, i.e., such that it can only be brought about through language?... The first aspect I want to mention is this: in language we formulate things. Though language we can bring to explicit awareness what we formerly had only an implicit sense of. Through formulating some matter, we bring it to fuller and clearer consciousness. This is the function that Herder focuses on in his critique of Condillac in ‘On the Origin of Languages.’” (Pg. 256-257)
He summarizes, “Thus there are three things that get done in language: making articulations, and hence bringing about explicit awareness; putting things in public space, thereby constituting public space; and making the discriminations which are foundational to human concerns, and hence opening us to these concerns. These are functions for which language seems indispensable.” (Pg. 263)
Later, he adds, “once we understand that language is about the creation of public space, and that public space has participants---indeed, it is just what exists between participants, making them such in the act of communication---then we can see that there cannot be a totally non-participatory learning of language. The whole idea is at base inconsistent.” (Pg. 282)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Taylor’s thought and its development.
Charles Margrave Taylor (born 1931) is a Canadian philosopher who taught at Oxford and McGill University; he is also a practicing Roman Catholic.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1985 collection of papers, “Despite the appearance of variety in the papers published in this collection, they are the work of a monomaniac; or perhaps better, what Isaiah Berlin has called a hedgehog. If not a single idea, then at least a single rather tightly related agenda underlines all of them. If one had to find a name for where this agenda falls in the geography of philosophical domains, the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ would perhaps be best, although this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers uneasy. I started on it with a polemical concern.
"I wanted to argue against the understanding of human life and action implicit in an influential family of theories in the sciences of man. The common feature of this family is the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences. Theories of this kind seem to me terribly implausible. They lead to bad science: either they end up in wordy elaborations of the obvious, or they fail altogether to address the interesting questions, or their practitioners end up squandering their talents and ingenuity in the attempt to show that they can after all recapture the insights of ordinary life in their manifestly reductive explanatory languages.” (Pg. 1)
He continues, “Our personhood cannot be treated scientifically in exactly the same way we approach our organic being. What it is to possess a liver or a heart is something I can define quite independently of the space of questions in which I exist for myself, but not what it is to have a self or be a person. In any case, it is this thesis about the self that I aspire to make clearly and convincingly.” (Pg. 4)
He acknowledges, “the case for the ultimately moral grounding of modern naturalism needs to be made again, with more convincing argument and with finer moral discriminations. Having said this, I cannot claim to be very advanced in this task… But I think I see better than in the past what such a case would involve. Apart from the negative side of the argument, the case that naturalism makes a bad philosophy of science (which I think has been very powerfully made), the positive thesis can only be established in an historical account. This would have to show how, through the whole course of the development of the modern identity, the moral motivation has been intertwined with the epistemological, how the latter has never been a sufficient motive force but has always been seconded by the former…” (Pg. 7)
He adds, “So what I have to offer here is, alas, mainly promissory notes… I mentioned above that the idea account of the spiritual basis of modern naturalism should not only be very convincing as interpretation, but should also allow us to discriminate sensitively what we want to affirm and what we want to reject. But even before such an account has been worked out we can try to define more clearly the features of a modern identity, and the ideals which help constitute it, and offer a critique of them.” (Pg. 8)
He begins chapter 6 with the observation, “The kind of reflection which can be called philosophical cannot simply precede empirical discovery and lay out the field of the possible and the impossible. It can only be a reflection on empirical findings, raising questions about their interpretation, about the connections between them, about the problems they raise or help to solve. In this sense, ‘philosophy’ shades into the kind of reflection and discussion which any innovative empirical scientist must engage in. It can only be distinguished, if at all, in that we like to reserve the term for questions about the more fundamental issues.” (Pg. 139)
He concludes chapter 7, “mechanism is neither a certainty, as the sole metaphysic compatible with science, as its protagonists claim, nor is it inconceivable, and necessarily doomed to deny the undeniable, as some philosophers have argued. But in examining these invalid arguments, some clarity has been gained. What this examination seems to point toward is a dissolution of the alternative mechanism---dualism; it invites us to examine a non-dualistic conception of man which is nevertheless not linked with a reductivist notion of the sciences of man. This would, of course, involve an ontology with more than one level; in other words, it would mean that although some principles govern the behavior of all things, others apply only to some; and yet the latter cannot be shown as special cases of the former.” (Pg. 186)
He states, “We see language as a whole, as an activity with---potentially at least---a depth structure. The task is now to give an objective account of this depth structure and its operation, which underlies the activity of language we observe. This is now the agenda. In this the science of language is simply one example of a global shift in the objectivist sciences of man since the eighteenth century. The shift is away from a set of theories in terms of ‘surface’ or observable realities, principally the contents of the mind available to introspection, in favor of theories in terms of ‘deep’ or unobservable mechanisms or structures.” (Pg. 240-241)
He outlines, “I want to abstract from the various theories … three important aspects of language activity… These are three (mutually compatible) answers to the question: what are we bringing about in language and essentially through language, i.e., such that it can only be brought about through language?... The first aspect I want to mention is this: in language we formulate things. Though language we can bring to explicit awareness what we formerly had only an implicit sense of. Through formulating some matter, we bring it to fuller and clearer consciousness. This is the function that Herder focuses on in his critique of Condillac in ‘On the Origin of Languages.’” (Pg. 256-257)
He summarizes, “Thus there are three things that get done in language: making articulations, and hence bringing about explicit awareness; putting things in public space, thereby constituting public space; and making the discriminations which are foundational to human concerns, and hence opening us to these concerns. These are functions for which language seems indispensable.” (Pg. 263)
Later, he adds, “once we understand that language is about the creation of public space, and that public space has participants---indeed, it is just what exists between participants, making them such in the act of communication---then we can see that there cannot be a totally non-participatory learning of language. The whole idea is at base inconsistent.” (Pg. 282)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Taylor’s thought and its development.
December 14, 2025
The earlier chapters reframe the standard assumptions of social/behavioral sciences in an insightful way. The later critique of traditional linguistic theories of meaning is pretty rudimentary for students of contemporary sociolinguistics/linguistic anthropology, but a good introduction to better theories for people outside of those traditions.
November 16, 2013
I was first introduced to this collection in second year undergrad. It blew me away. I hadn't yet read philosophy with this many layers to keep up with, and it took a while for me to get my brain into that sort of shape. But Taylor's creativity and vision with respect to the constitution of the self (we are language "all the way down") are so eloquent once unpacked. The second volume is no less valuable.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews