Dilemmas and connections

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

2011

414 p.

9780674284364

ALLIES AND INTERLOCUTORS -- Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy -- Understanding the other: a Gadamerian view on conceptual schemes -- Language not mysterious? -- Celan and the recovery of language -- SOCIAL THEORY -- Nationalism and modernity -- Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights -- Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?) -- Religious mobilizations -- THEMES FROM A SECULAR AGE -- A catholic modernity? -- Notes on the sources of violence: perennial and modern -- The future of the religious past -- Disenchantment-reenchantment -- What does secularism mean? -- Die Blosse Vernunft ("Reason alone") -- Perils of moralism -- What was the axial revolution? -- Notes -- Credits -- Index.

There are always more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in one's philosophy - and in those 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 contributious 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. He also speculates on how irrationality emerges from the heart of rationality itself, and why violence breaks out again and again.

Английский