Social Science Research Council
Charles Taylor is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the former Chicele Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford and is professor emeritus of political science and philosophy at McGill University. Among his publications are Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 1975), Philosophical Papers (2 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1985), Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1989), and Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004). He is currently working on topics in social and political theory having to do with multiculturalism, secularization, and alternative modernities. His latest book, A Secular Age, was recently published by Harvard University Press. Taylor is a member of the SSRC working group on religion, secularism, and international affairs.
What are we to think of the idea, entertained by Rawls for a time, that one can legitimately ask of a religiously and philosophically diverse democracy that everyone deliberate in a language of reason alone, leaving their religious views in the vestibule of the public sphere? The tyrannical nature of this demand was rapidly appreciated by Rawls, to his credit. But we ought to ask why the proposition arose in the first place.
Read the rest of Secularism and critique.
Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God feels like two books, oddly yoked together. One is a fascinating study, which traces a post-Enlightenment tradition of theorizing about religion starting from an anthropocentric focus. Religion is to be understood from the human desire or craving or need for religion. The originator of this way of thinking is Rousseau, but he rapidly acquires followers in Germany: Kant, the German Romantics, Schleiermacher. [...]
Robert Bellah’s latest post poses clearly the issues that we’ve been agonizing over in Canada, and in a different way now in Quebec. Lots of people want to shy away from a political identity which is primarily defined in ethnic terms. On the contrary when asked what are the crucial uniting ideas of our society, they come up with some variant of universal “values,” defined in terms of modern charters of rights (all heavily influenced by the Universal Declaration), principles of equality and non-discrimination, and democracy. Canadian “multiculturalism” fits into this category, as does “interculturalisme” in Quebec. [...]
Read the rest of Constitutional patriotism.
Having escaped for a few seconds from the Commission, I had a chance to read many of the very interesting posts to the blog. With many I agree, others not. But there are two points where I obviously failed to communicate what I wanted to say (possibly because that is incoherent, though I hope not). [...]
One great problem is that the term “secular” is a western term, and corresponds to a very old distinction within Christendom. Then it goes through a series of changes in order to surface in such neologisms as “secularization,” and “secularism.” But even so, some of the original meanings carry over. These terms are then applied unreflectingly to what are seen as analogous processes and ideas elsewhere, and the result can be great confusion. [...]
As I read Wendy Brown’s recent post on A Secular Age, I see that I made a bad job of communicating my intent. I organized the book in sections, and the main thrust of my account comes in the first half. Crucial to my view is a Foucault-influenced notion of Reform as both feeding on and further potentiating certain disciplines, which become woven into our family, work, schooling and professional lives and hence continue to define us. What I call the “buffered self” is one facet of what results. [...]
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