In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVII: Charles Taylor—The Malaise of Modernity
In our last article, we explored Charles Taylor’s discussion of a new religion that took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Providential Deism. Yet, as we saw, it was not entirely new but in many respects a development and expansion of themes already expounded on by the Protestant Reformation. Where the Protestant Reformers accused Catholicism of being authoritarian, superstitious, Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVI: Charles Taylor — Providential Deism and the Impersonal Order
In the last article, we saw how the Protestant Reformation challenged the premodern conception of reality, and began to put in place some of the elements we can recognize today in modern, Western-style secularism. In particular, there was a “flattening effect” when it came to time, space, and devotion. More and more, secular, ordinary time came to the forefront. The Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXV: Charles Taylor—The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of the Disciplinary Society
In previous articles, we’ve taken some first steps toward answering the underlying question of Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. He asks us to look at Europe around the year 1500, and observe that belief in God had an unproblematic, normative, even a central, character for those societies. But when we look around today, we find a very different climate. Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIV: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part B)
In our previous articles, we began to explore what Charles Taylor calls the “bulwarks of belief.” These are the aspects of psychology and society that made belief nearly irresistible for most Europeans around the year 1500. Taylor postulates these bulwarks thus: that purpose and design were evident in nature and history; that God was implicated in the very existence of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIII: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part A)
In the previous article, we explored the “Bulwarks of Belief”—those features of the premodern, European mindset that, according to Charles Taylor, made belief in transcendent realities nearly inescapable. There were basically three of them: God’s purposes were evident in the design of nature, and in particular incidents (often construed as this-worldly dispensations of divine justice); God was implicated in the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXII: Charles Taylor—The Bulwarks of Belief (A Secular Age, Part B)
In our last article, we began to explore the philosophy of secularism, through Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. We saw how Taylor’s three senses of the word describe a progressive development: first, a retreat of religion (itself a problematic term) from the public to the private sphere; then, a decline of religiosity in the private sphere; and finally, the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXI: Charles Taylor: A Secular Age (Part A)
Of the three elements in our series—science, religion, and secularism—science has probably received the most philosophical attention, at least in the contemporary context. Indeed, the constitution of a category, “philosophy of religion,” presumes a sectioning-off of certain topics that have, historically, been integral to philosophy. It presumes, in other words, a growing distance between religion and philosophy. This in turn Continue Reading …
Not School Happenings In February
Our Not School groups are reading Karl Jaspers, Charles Taylor, Paolo Friere, and possibly Woolf or Nabokov. Don’t forget the upcoming Aftershow discussion of Whitehead too. Come join up!
Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and the Ethics of Authenticity
Emerson’s ideal involves a background assumption about how human nature works.