Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

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Cambridge University Press, Mar 12, 1992 - Philosophy - 601 pages
'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.
 

Contents

Inescapable Frameworks
3
The Self in Moral Space
25
Ethics of Inarticulacy 53
53
Moral Sources
91
PART II
105
Inwardness
109
Moral Topography III
111
Platos SelfMastery
115
God Loveth Adverbs
211
Rationalized Christianity
234
Moral Sentiments
248
The Providential Order
266
The Culture of Modernity
285
Fractured Horizons
305
Radical Enlightenment
321
Nature as Source
355

In Interiore Homine
127
Descartess Disengaged Reason
143
Lockes Punctual Self
159
Exploring lHumaine Condition
177
Inner Nature
185
A Digression on Historical Explanation
199
PART III
209
The Expressivist Turn
368
Our Victorian Contemporaries
393
Visions of the PostRomantic Age
419
Epiphanies of Modernism
456
The Conflicts of Modernity
495
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