A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year

A major new work by Charles Taylor: the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal, exploring the Romantic poetics central to his theory of language.

The Language Animal, Charles Taylor's 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor's exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.

Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor's magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Milosz, and beyond.

In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving--too obviously true--to be ignored.

We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human. --John Cottingham, The Tablet

In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process.

For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition--Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs--assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation.

Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of the language animal, Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

Science and technology is a part of our past, present and future. It makes up everything we do and everything we are. This revised and updated edition of The Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia is now enhanced with augmented reality, making it an exciting and essential go-to science resource for children aged 7+ and all the family.

The Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia explores key scientific fields including space and time, technology, power, the human body and the environment. This newly revised fourth edition has been fully updated by expert authors to include the latest groundbreaking discoveries in the world of science, including SpaceX launches, the fight against climate change, and the advancement of AI.

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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Tablet Best Book of the Year
Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award

One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society. --The Economist

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in Western Christendom of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

In Malaise of Modernity, Charles Taylor focuses on the key modern concept of self-fulfillment, often attacked as the central support of what Christopher Lasch has called the culture of narcissism. To Taylor, self-fulfillment, although often expressed in self-centered ways, isn't necessarily a rejection of traditional values and social commitment; it also reflects something authentic and valuable in modern culture. Only by distinguishing what is good in this modern striving from what is socially and politically dangerous, Taylor says, can our age be made to deliver its promise.

In his 1991 CBC Massey Lectures, philosopher Charles Taylor elucidates the modern concept of self-fulfilment.

Charles Taylor is a philosopher of broad reach and many talents, but his most striking talent is a gift for interpreting different traditions, cultures and philosophies to one another...[This book is] full of good things. --New York Times Book Review

Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity's challenges.

The great merit of Taylor's brief, non-technical, powerful book...is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social...Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people...The core of Taylor's argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that 'respect for difference' requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture--no matter how vicious or stupid.
--Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

This is a major and comprehensive study of the philosophy of Hegel, his place in the history of ideas, and his continuing relevance and importance. Professor Taylor relates Hegel to the earlier history of philosophy and, more particularly, to the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his own time. He engages with Hegel sympathetically, on Hegel's own terms and, as the subject demands, in detail. This important book is now reissued with a fresh new cover.

One of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, Charles Taylor is internationally renowned for his contributions to political and moral theory, particularly to debates about identity formation, multiculturalism, secularism, and modernity. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor continues his recent reflections on the theme of multiple modernities. To account for the differences among modernities, Taylor sets out his idea of the social imaginary, a broad understanding of the way a given people imagine their collective social life.

Retelling the history of Western modernity, Taylor traces the development of a distinct social imaginary. Animated by the idea of a moral order based on the mutual benefit of equal participants, the Western social imaginary is characterized by three key cultural forms--the economy, the public sphere, and self-governance. Taylor's account of these cultural formations provides a fresh perspective on how to read the specifics of Western modernity: how we came to imagine society primarily as an economy for exchanging goods and services to promote mutual prosperity, how we began to imagine the public sphere as a metaphorical place for deliberation and discussion among strangers on issues of mutual concern, and how we invented the idea of a self-governing people capable of secular founding acts without recourse to transcendent principles. Accessible in length and style, Modern Social Imaginaries offers a clear and concise framework for understanding the structure of modern life in the West and the different forms modernity has taken around the world.

Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live...and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader. --Martha Nussbaum, New Republic

In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led--it seems to many--to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.

The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor's goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

This rich study explores the elements of Hegel's social and political thought that are most relevant to our society today. Combating the prevailing post-World War II stereotype of Hegel as a proto-fascist, Charles Taylor argues that Hegel aimed not to deny the rights of individuality but to synthesise them with the intrinsic good of community membership. Hegel's goal of a society of free individuals whose social activity is expressive of who they are seems an even more distant goal now, and Taylor's discussion has renewed relevance for our increasingly globalised and industrialised society. This classic work is presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century with a specially commissioned new preface written by Frederick Neuhouser.

There are, always, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in one's philosophy--and in these 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 contributions 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 the continuity of religion from the past into the future; the nature of the secular; the folly of hoping to live by reason alone; and the perils of moralism. He also speculates on how irrationality emerges from the heart of rationality itself, and why violence breaks out again and again.

In A Secular Age, Taylor more evidently foregrounded his Catholic faith, and there are several essays here that further explore that faith. Overall, this is a hopeful book, showing how, while acknowledging the force of religion and the persistence of violence and folly, we nonetheless have the power to move forward once we have given up the brittle pretensions of a narrow rationalism.

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.

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.

Among the leading philosophers of our time, Charles Taylor stands out for the sheer breadth of his interests and influence...Illuminating and rewarding. --David Miller, Times Literary Supplement

Charles Taylor is one of the most important English-language philosophers at work today; he is also unique in the philosophical community in applying his ideas on language and epistemology to social theory and political problems. In this book Taylor brings together some of his best essays, including Overcoming Epistemology, The Validity of Transcendental Argument, Irreducibly Social Goods, and The Politics of Recognition. As usual, his arguments are trenchant, straddling the length and breadth of contemporary philosophy and public discourse.

The strongest theme running through the book is Taylor's critique of disengagement, instrumental reason, and atomism: that individual instances of knowledge, judgment, discourse, or action cannot be intelligible in abstraction from the outside world. By developing his arguments about the importance of engaged agency, Taylor simultaneously addresses themes in philosophical debate and in a broader discourse of political theory and cultural studies. The thirteen essays in this collection reflect most of the concerns with which he has been involved throughout his career--language, ideas of the self, political participation, the nature of modernity. His intellectual range is extraordinary, as is his ability to clarify what is at stake in difficult philosophical disputes. Taylor's analyses of liberal democracy, welfare economics, and multiculturalism have real political significance, and his voice is distinctive and wise.

The Explanation of Behaviour was the first book written by the renowned philosopher Charles Taylor. A vitally important work of philosophical anthropology, it is a devastating criticism of the theory of behaviourism, a powerful explanatory approach in psychology and philosophy when Taylor's book was first published. However, Taylor has far more to offer than a simple critique of behaviourism. He argues that in order to properly understand human beings, we must grasp that they are embodied, minded creatures with purposes, plans and goals, something entirely lacking in reductionist, scientific explanations of human behaviour.

Taylor's book is also prescient in according a central place to non-human animals, which like human beings are subject to needs, desires and emotions. However, because human beings have the unique ability to interpret and reflect on their own actions and purposes and declare them to others, Taylor argues that human experience differs to that of other animals. Furthermore, the fact that human beings are often directed by their purposes has a fundamental bearing on how we understand the social and moral world.

Taylor's classic work is essential reading for those in philosophy and psychology as well as related areas such as sociology and religion.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by Alva Noë, setting the book in philosophical and historical context.

During WWII, Iowans of the Mighty Eighth Air Force were based in England from 1942 to 1946, a year after the end of WWII. Ground crews labored endlessly to keep aircraft flyable by scavenging and often manufacturing parts until supply lines could be established. Aircrews flew in un-pressurized, unheated, piston-engine airplanes where temperatures inside the aircraft reached sixty degrees below zero. Read the experiences of over three hundred Iowa veterans of the greatest air armada ever assembled, Iowans of the The Might Eighth.

The Archie Lee Ivy Story
A new biography highlights the remarkable life of Reverend Archie Ivy who is the senior pastor at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has been pastor there for 25 years and has made New Hope an integral part of Milwaukee's central city. His church ministry has made a significant difference in the city including housing a charter school, offering a food bank and working for economic justice for the poor. He says the church must instill hope in people and help them discover a better way of life.
He was born in Shannon Mississippi at home, on August 17, 1942. He came of age in the Deep South during a time of Klansmen; Colored and White signs in public spaces and with Blacks sitting in the back of the bus. He grew up dirt-poor-the oldest of Mose and Ruby Ivy's ten children. Archie can remember moving from shack to shack over a dozen times by mule and wagon before he was a teenager. His father was a sharecropper during those transient years and had to go wherever he could find work. Although Shannon was a small rural town with less than 600 people it was still segregated. Archie attended the Shannon Colored School which housed all of the town's Blacks in one building-grades K-12.
Church life was the culture center for Blacks in Shannon. Church was all that we had as a people, says Archie. Archie gave his life to Christ at the age of 9 years old. His grandmother, 'Big Mama Ollie', who Archie says, loved the lord taught him about the bible and started him on his spiritual journey.
He was the first in his family to attend college and upon graduation moved north to Milwaukee to start his teaching career. He felt the call to ministry while he was still a teacher, but resisted for nearly a decade. He said he wasn't running away from his calling, as much as he was trying to make himself acceptable to God. Once I submitted to God's will I dedicated my life to Christ, says Archie. This is the path that God has chosen for me. I'm here by assignment.
If you admire people who never give up; who achieve great things despite impossible odds; who devote their life to caring for others and who serve as a role model for many, you'll enjoy Dr. Ivy's story.
Here's what two Milwaukee leaders think:
Dr. Archie Ivy's biography is a must read for those who want lessons in how a pastor not only provides spiritual guidance, but rolls up his sleeves to advance the needs of a community's most underserved population. His commitment to making sure that we are indeed our brother's keeper is exemplary and a lesson for all of those who truly believe that a Pastor's job extends far beyond preaching on Sundays.-Dr. Howard Fuller, founder & Board Chair- Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy.

Rev. Dr. Archie Ivy continues to contribute to the betterment of Milwaukee as a consummate Christian Leader. His impact has been as an educator and then advocate of reform for public schools, the penal system and the health system; all in addition to his Pastoral leadership of his church and as a leader among the Milwaukee Clergy. His is a quiet, deep strength working for justice, inclusion, and equality in Milwaukee.-Rev. Carmen Porco, Executive Director- Wisconsin Housing Ministries

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition, this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.

Praise for the previous edition:

An Essay On The Theology Of The Didache, With The Greek Text: Forming An Appendix To Two Lectures On The Teaching Of The Twelve Apostles (1889) is a scholarly work by Charles Taylor. The book is a detailed analysis of the Didache, a Christian text believed to have been written in the first century AD. The author provides an in-depth exploration of the theology presented in the Didache, offering insights into the beliefs and practices of early Christianity. The book includes the original Greek text of the Didache, as well as a translation into English. The work is intended for scholars of Christian theology and history, as well as anyone interested in the early development of Christianity. Published in 1889, this book remains a valuable resource for those studying the origins of Christian thought and practice.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society. --The Economist

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in Western Christendom of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.