The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: 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. (shrink)

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection between animal and disability liberation--the debut of an important new social critic How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities--how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much does our definition of "human" depend on its difference from "animal"? Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura (...) Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled--and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics." Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice--which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition--are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, and science--including factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals--Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that will open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant debut author. (shrink)

Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel of (...) its appreciation. This claim is defended via reflection on (i) the art of photography, (ii) the concepts of ‘attentional salience’ and ‘experienced mandates’, and (iii) a virtue-based account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

Introduction to Hegel's thought for the student and general reader, emphasizing in particular his social and political thought and his continuing relevance to contemporary problems.

Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements (...) of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences. (shrink)

This article argues for a ban on the performance of medically unnecessary genital normalizing surgeries as part of assigning a binary sex/gender to infants with intersex conditions on the basis of autonomy, regardless of etiology. It does this via a dis/analogy with the classic case in bioethics of Jehovah Witness (JW) parents' inability to refuse life-saving blood transfusions for their minor children. Both cases address ethical medical practice in situations where parents are making irreversible medical decisions on the basis of (...) values strongly held, identity, and relationship-shaping values—such as religious beliefs or beliefs regarding the inherent value of binary sex/gender—amidst ethical pluralism. Furthermore, it takes seriously—as we must in the intersex case—that the restriction of parents' right to choose will likely result in serious harms to potentially large percentage of patients, their families, and their larger communities. I address the objection that parents' capacity to choose is restricted in the JW case on the basis of the harm principle or a duty to nonmaleficence, given that the result of parent choice would be death. I provide evidence that this is mistaken from how we treat epistemic uncertainty in the JW case and from cases in which clinicians are ethically obligated to restrict the autonomy of nonminor patients. I conclude that we restrict the parents' right to choose in the JW case—and should in the case of pediatric intersex surgery—to secure patient's future autonomy. (shrink)

Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic (...) explanation for this derogation. (shrink)

At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor was dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. With her illness no longer treatable, she began at the start of 2016 to write about her experiences and, in an extraordinary creative surge, wrote what would become Dying: A Memoir. This is a brief and clear-eyed account of what dying taught Cory: amid the tangle of her feelings, she reflects on the patterns of her life, and remembers the lives and deaths of her parents. She (...) tells us why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her own death.Dying is about the vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, anger and acceptance that it takes to live a good life and say goodbye to it in peace. (shrink)

Reflecting teams play a significant role in family therapy; they broaden perspectives on how family dynamics or problems can be understood. However, what happens when a reflector does not feel compassionate towards a particular family member? There is a risk of biased reflections: families can pick up negative signals, putting the therapeutic relationship at risk. In this paper, I explore how I was supported to explore my lack of compassion for Dad ‘John’. It was only after reaching out to an (...) experienced supervisor who undertook an ‘internalised other’ interview with me – where I played the role of Dad – did my compassion increase. From an ethics of care perspective, I suggest that social professionals need to explore ways to increase empathy and compassion for clients they dislike. If they do not, they are open to valid criticism that they are behaving unethically as professionals. Therefore, there is a need to address deficits in empathy and compassion to sustain ethical social work practices. (shrink)

Where does my body begin? Where does it end? What is inside my body? What is outside? What is primary? What is secondary? What is natural? What is artificial? Science fiction has long imagined a future fusion of humanity with technology. Today, many of us—especially people with health issues such as autoimmune diseases—have functionally become hybrids connected to other machines and to other bodies. The combination of artificial intelligence with implants, transplants, prostheses, and genetic reprogramming is transforming medical research and (...) treatment, and it is now also transforming what we thought was human nature. Mark C. Taylor identifies this process as “intervolution” and explores how it is weaving together smart things and smart bodies to create new forms of life. Our wired bodies are no longer freestanding individuals, but interconnected nodes in worldwide networks. Recognizing this transformation overturns deeply entrenched distinctions and oppositions between minds and bodies. Intervolution reveals that we are already cyborgs, integral cogs in what will become a superorganism of bodies and things. (shrink)

What are the primary characteristics that define what it means to be human? And what happens to those characteristics in the face of technology past, present, and future? The three essays in Image, by leading philosophers of religion Mark Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas Carlson, play at this intersection of the human and the technological, building out from Heidegger's notion that humans master the world by picturing or representing the real.Taylor's essay traces a history of capitalism, dwelling on (...) the lack of humility, particularly in the face of our own mortality, that is the persistent failure of humans, before turning to art as a possible way to bring us back to earth and recover humility before it is too late. Rubenstein zeroes in on the delusions of imaginative conquest associated with space travel. Through a genealogy of the modern "view from space" from the iconic Earth rise photo of 1968 up to the new privatized American space race, Rubenstein provides an analysis of the perils of the one-world and the false unity it projects. In his essay, Carlson takes as his starting point the surveillance capitalism of facial recognition technology. He dives deep into Heidegger to meditate on the elimination of individuals through totalizing gestures and the relationship between such elimination and our encounters with mortality. Each of these essays, in its own way, reflects on the nature of imagination, the character of technological vision in contemporary culture, and the implications of these for the kinds of sociality and love that condition our human experience. (shrink)

Many of our beliefs are the product of inference and depend on chains of reasoning from other beliefs we hold. Inferential internalism is the view that an inference can only provide justification if one is aware of the support relation that holds between the premises and conclusion. This inferential internalist requirement is controversial even among epistemologists who accept internalist conditions on justification more generally. In this paper, we argue that the intuition underlying a central motivation for internalism more generally is (...) the same intuition that motivates inferential internalism. As such, internalists who reject the more demanding requirements of inferential internalism are prima facie involved in a problematic inconsistency. We finish the paper by considering a dilemma for inferential internalism and presenting two strategies for responding. (shrink)

Through practices aimed at strengthening key dimensions of well-being, from feeling at home in your body to tapping into the wisdom that already lives within you, Taylor Elyse Morrison, founder of the lifestyle brand Inner Workout, guides you to discover what "self-care" truly means and helps you cultivate a dynamic relationship with your whole being.

Discussions on faith and philosophy centered around works by Merleau-Ponty, Holderlin, Baudeliare, Dostoyevsky, and Brother Emile.

On the Contemplative Life is known for its depiction of a philosophical group of Jewish men and women known as the 'Therapeutae'. Yet the reasons for their depiction have been little understood. In the first commentary on the treatise in English for over 100 years, the social, cultural and political background of the times in which Philo lived are shown to be crucial in understanding Philo's purposes. As Alexandrian Jews were vilified and attacked, Philo went to Rome to present the (...) case for his community, faced with intense opposition. Side-stepping direct confrontation, Philo here cleverly presents the Therapeutae as the pinnacle of excellence, most especially in their communal meal, while ridiculing his accusers in a stinging parody of a festive banquet. (shrink)

How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation state? Essays from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which mourning (...) blurs the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance as a concept. (shrink)

Commitment to sparseness amounts to the idea that there is an objective, worldly privileging of certain properties over others that makes the privileged properties suited to play certain roles, and is responsible for their playing such roles. In this chapter I offer a brief, opinionated overview of sparseness. I begin by examining a set of problems that I call “problems of abundance”, which generate canonical motivations for sparseness. I then survey some influential approaches to sparseness and the roles that they (...) attribute to sparse properties, noting that on most approaches sparse properties are deeply connected to inquiry. Finally I consider some problems for sparseness, focusing on the purported connections between sparseness and inquiry, particularly in philosophy of science and inquiry into the social world. (shrink)

"The epistle of Porphyry to the Egyptian Anebo": p. [1]-16.