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Hat die Gestaltung von Arbeitsbedingungen Einfluss auf die Beschaffenheit von Demokratien? Diese Frage ist der Leitgedanke, dem Axel Honneth in seiner umfangreichen Studie Der arbeitende Souverän – Eine normative Theorie der Arbeit folgt. Lesenswert ist diese zum einen, weil sie den Befund stellt, dass heutige Arbeitsverhältnisse sich negativ auf die Teilnahme an demokratischen Prozessen auswirken. Zum anderen zeigt er, welche arbeitspolitischen Weichenstellungen Arbeitnehmer:innen in die Lage versetzen können, sich erneut an der Erneuerung und Stabilisierung einer Demokratie zu engagieren.

This article presents the work of Czech theologian and priest Tomáš Halík as a theology for the post-secular. The first section outlines three general post-secular themes woven throughout his corpus: the blessedness of spiritual seeking, a receptivity to the critical insights of atheism, and the affirmation of doubt and uncertainty as an integral feature of Christian faith. The second section then demonstrates what is distinctive about Halík's contribution: his engagement with themes of both plurality and uncertainty in a single theological schema. I argue this is an apt response to the post-secular dynamics of the nova effect—as outlined by Charles Taylor and others—that is otherwise lacking in the literature to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 1 of the book "The Poetic of Reason: Introducing Rational Poetic Experimentalism" by Stefán Snævarr is presented. it explores the central notions of emotions and feelings and their cognitive role. It highlights construalism of Robert Roberts and Charles Taylor and his theory of articulation.

This article responds to the contributors to this special issue. I clarify my views on critical theory, capitalism, morality, sociality, secularity, subjectivity, and childhood. I close with some general remarks about the necessity for a hermeneutical approach to social, ethical, and political questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critics observe a methodological flaw in Taylor's work. They claim that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor's historical approach on the one hand and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence on the other. This article challenges this verdict by disambiguating the relation between the role of history in Taylor's narrative and his personal defense of fullness in terms of religious openness to agapeic transcendence. In order to underpin this position, I first assess the originality of Taylor's analysis of the historical origin of secularization by comparing his master reform narrative with other stories of secularization (§2), in particular that of Marcel Gauchet (§23). The outcome of this comparison leads to the question regarding the ontological presence of transcendence as a religious experience of fullness. Taylor's answer to this question is evaluated from an epistemological stance (§4) and a more general cultural approach (§5). In order to retrieve a religious experience of fullness, Taylor highlights the important role of what he calls subtler languages (§6). Finally, the question is raised how subtle words in a 'post-revolutionary climate' may retrieve that personal, religious experience of fullness (§7). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Taylor's method of philosophical argumentation is distinctive, interlacing historical, ontological, phenomenological, hermeneutical, theistic, and ethical strands. His writings contribute to debates in many domains, including sociology, theology, and political theory, speaking both to his peers in the academy and to wider publics. Often, he assumes the role of socio-cultural critic, diagnosing the features of our contemporary culture and society that people experience as a loss or decline. In this paper, I focus on A Secular Age, where he discusses the predicament of the modern secularized self, who exists in a condition of spiritual instability, pulled in two directions: on the one side motivated by the oppressive effects of religious orthodoxy to reject the earlier established faiths; on the other side, driven by a sense of emptiness to look for something that could compensate for the meanings lost with theistic transcendence. My paper discusses Taylor's account of the 'immanent frame' of the modern secularized self-understanding, assessing the strengths and limitations of his hermeneutical approach to this self-understanding. It calls on him to develop its potentials as a more robust form of immanent critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This guest editor's introduction explains the rationale for the special issue 'Charles Taylor at 90: On Taylor's Legacy and Impact.' It describes the contributions to the special issue and summarizes Taylor's replies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within his earliest contributions to the human sciences, Charles Taylor challenged dominant behavioral views by advancing a hermeneutical conception of human agency. For Taylor, persons continually navigate their meaningful worlds and make sense of things and act in light of background horizons of significance and social imaginaries. Yet, conceptions of children have lagged as dominant outlooks construe young people as immature and incapable – perpetuating behavioral approaches to controlling their actions rather than hermeneutic ones that recognize them as agents. Working with Taylor's ideas, I discuss a Childhood Ethics ontological approach to understanding children and childhood. Specifically, I: (a) draw on Taylor's critique of naturalistic approaches to the human sciences to highlight problems that underlie universalist claims about all childhoods; (b) relate Taylor's articulation of human agency, centered on strong evaluation and human linguistic capacity, to the Philosophy of Childhood and Childhood Studies to address current questions regarding our understanding of agency within childhood; and (c) describe a hermeneutic ontology that can inform the development of empirical research, policy-making and practices that relate to children. I close with an outline of priority questions that can orient future investigations within this area of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his critique of the therapeutic, Taylor argues that therapy fails to engage with the ethical and spiritual significance of human suffering. Therapy's denial of ethics is representative of a wider modern difficulty with accommodating Taylor's view of ethical discourse as the articulation of the qualitative distinctions of worth implicit in our strong evaluations. In the case of therapy, this rejection of ethics stems from the claim to offer a set of scientifically based techniques of psychological change, and from protections for patient autonomy that are derived from a negative conception of liberty. Taylor's critique of negative liberty demonstrates the inevitability of strong evaluation and serves to highlight how therapy covertly offers ethical proposals while denying that it is doing so. A psychoanalytic case vignette illustrates how it would be possible to give an ethical frame to therapeutic aims. To locate standard conceptions of psychological health in the context of Taylor's history of the modern identity would emphasize their ethical significance and open the possibility to move therapy beyond the therapeutic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Charles Taylor's philosophy of human sociality, focusing especially on Taylor's analysis of what happens, when a linguistic exchange or conversation starts. On his view, a shared space emerges, in which some object or topic is irreducibly 'for us', entre nous, not merely 'for me' and 'for you,'. When something is brought to our shared attention, a 'we' is at the same time created. This article asks, first, how this differs from mutual recognition of others as candidate conversation partners, and from joint commitments, which bind the parties and structure further joint action. The article argues, against Margaret Gilbert, that these are three different phenomena highlighting different aspects of human sociality. Secondly, the article discusses the nature of the 'we': does the irreducibility claim commit Taylor to a view of plural subjects or 'group minds'? Thirdly, the article outlines two possible readings of a 'shared space': one posits an emergent social layer and another an emergence of a 'conversationally extended mind'. Both are possible interpretations of Taylor's account, while neither is committed to a notorious phenomenal group mind or to a more demanding rational unity -view (Carol Rovane). Taylor's 'entre nous' offers a distinct perspective, of continuing relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that we should read Taylor's philosophy as a philosophy of liberation and that it is as a philosopher of liberation that Taylor distinguishes himself as a critical theorist. It begins with a short outline of Taylor's theory of freedom, emphasising the conception it contains of the process of becoming free. It then looks at Taylor's view of the role theory can take in that process. The liberating power of theory isn't something that Taylor often remarks explicitly upon, but from the few remarks he does make it is clear that he sees his own theory as potentially having such a power. The discussion then turns to the tasks of critical theory. After summarising these tasks, the paper considers how Taylor attempts to address them in his own work. The point of the discussion is not just to show the convergence between Taylor's theoretical agenda and that of critical theory, but also to indicate how critical theory can learn from the integration in Taylor's work of the tasks critical theory sets itself. The paper concludes by noting a dilemma that faces critical theorists who aspire to such integration today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims is to clarify two opposing interpretations of Charles Taylor's philosophy against the backdrop of the current crisis of liberal capitalism. The first, de-radicalizing reading, insists that liberal modernity is reformable and radical transformation to a post-capitalist society untenable. The second, radicalizing reading, underscores the possibility of transcending liberal-capitalism but paradoxically through the fulfillment of liberalism's own values. Where de-radicalizers see in Taylor's philosophy an attempt to stabilize the existing order, radicalizers perceive it as offering resources for a new kind of democracy. The goal is not to determine which – if either – of these readings matches Taylor's self-understanding but to bring into focus the dynamic tensions available to readers of his astonishingly rich political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given Taylor's status as one of the most important thinkers in contemporary moral and political philosophy, it is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been paid to the implications of his views for metaethics. To fill this gap, this paper considers the highly unorthodox approach to metaethics articulated in his philosophy. While his views can be seen as 'anti-metaethical,' I argue that Taylor in fact takes the cause of metaethics in a new direction by showing the problems of moral realism in a whole new light. To demonstrate this, I first sketch the mainstream debate on moral realism (§1) to clear the way for Taylor's non-mainstream approach (§2). I continue to explain his unusual position by highlighting the contrast between the classical conception of moral facts and Taylor's key concepts of 'strong evaluation' and 'moral sources' (§3). Against the background of this contrast, I turn to Taylor's view on the nature of language to explain how it informs his distinctive conception of moral realism (§4). I conclude by discussing the implications of Taylor's realism for wider trends within metaethics (§5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the dialogue that took place between the historian Quentin Skinner and the philosopher Charles Taylor with the relationship between historical explanation and normative evaluation in the disciplines of history, philosophy, and law.

In this essay I argue, first, that René Arcilla's project in his book Wim Wenders's Road Movies: Education without Learning, can be understood as an effort to draw the reader away from a conception of personhood grounded in the Enlightenment and towards an expressive‐romantic conception. Yet the sense of the person to which Arcilla leads the reader alters the Romantic conception considerably. Arcilla is attentive not only to how a disengaged, instrumental and fragmented approach to life can lead one astray but also to how a highly individualised search for authenticity and truth can sever one's connection to others and the world. In his proposal for a certain kind of education, Arcilla transcends and yet retains key components of the individualism that has troubled so many critics of both strands of the modern identity. The second argument of this essay is that a distinct pedagogical approach can be detected in Arcilla's text, one that is aligned with his conception of the kind of self into which the reader is being educated. In essence, Arcilla enacts the shifted conception of education that his book describes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Condillac argues that humans develop reason only once they have discovered the function of signs and the use of language in their encounters with others. Commentators like Hans Aarsleff and Charles Taylor believe that a precondition for this discovery is the presence of a special human capacity: the capacity to reflectively relate to what is given in experience. The problem with this claim is that it returns Condillac to a form of innatism from which he was keen to escape, because it assumes that human minds are reflective qua original endowment. I argue that Condillac attributed limited value to explanations based on the static analysis of innate natures and instead opted for a dynamic examination of developmental trajectories enabled through species‐specific embodied experiences. Through this dynamic approach, he was able to do two things at once: explain how it is possible that human cognition is of a unique superior kind, while at the same time defending the view that humans are like any other species in that they form species‐specific mental features through their experiential engagement with the contingent circumstances of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of spiritual formation which depend overmuch on individualism are likely distorted by that individualism, and this article argues that an account of collective-personhood can provide a necessary corrective to this anthropological distortion. The article begins by diagnosing the problem of individualism in formation, utilizing Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, and critiquing several common practices of spiritual formation. Following this, we consider Bonhoeffer's theological vision for the collective-person from his first book, Sanctorum Communio. Next, we examine Murray Bowen's Family Systems Theory to help us envision, from a social scientific perspective, how such a collective-personhood might look. The article concludes with a provisional model for spiritual formation of collective-persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a novel approach to the measurement of freedom of choice, on which the availability of an option is a matter of degree, rather than a bivalent matter of being either available or not. This approach is motivated by case studies involving weakness of will, where deficiencies in willpower seem to impair individual freedom by making certain alternatives much harder to pursue. This approach is perfectly general, however: its graded analysis of option availability can be extended to cases where weakness of will is not involved and can be used to generalize numerous existing measures of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical interpretation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a philosophical notion which exemplifies a secular conception of thinking. One way in which AI notably differs from the conventional understanding of "thinking" is that, according to AI, "intelligence" or "thinking" does not necessarily require "life" as a precondition: that it is possible to have "thinking without life." Building on Charles Taylor's critical account of secularity as well as Hubert Dreyfus' influential critique of AI, this article offers a theological analysis of AI's "lifeless" picture of thinking in relation to the Augustinian conception of God as "Life itself." Following this critical theological analysis, this article argues that AI's notion of thinking promotes a societal privilege of certain rationalistic or calculative ways of thought over more existential or spiritual ways of thinking, and thereby fosters a secularization or de-spiritualization of thinking as an ethical human practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this practitioners note I want, with a number of cases from my own fieldworks, highlight problems and possibilities of collecting first hand material about conflict with a specific focus on research brokers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I take a philosophical approach and seek to address the question of inter‐religious rituals and practices with reference to what Charles Taylor has called 'the immanent frame.' Whilst considering the dynamics of inter‐religious or cross‐religious ritual, this article will focus mainly on the idea of rituality occurring in an immanent frame or habitus (Pierre Bourdieu). I will argue that whilst there are specific cultic rituals that need to be negotiated as part of any form of explicit inter‐rituality, there is a larger potential that is suggested by a broader anthropological vision. Moreover, an 'immanent turn' by religions may be the positive step towards the joint creation of meaning and practice in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often claimed that the core moral concepts are universal, though the words used to articulate them have changed significantly. I reject this claim. Concepts cannot be disentangled from words; as these latter change, they change too. Thus the philosophical analysis of moral concepts cannot overlook the history of the words by which these concepts have been expressed. In the second part of the essay, I illustrate this claim with the example of happiness, showing how its original 'verdictive' meaning was overlaid, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a new psychological sense. Knowledge of this history should make us cautious, I suggest in conclusion, of narrowly psychological accounts of happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the need for the various religions and societies in Liberia to work together including the religions Christianity and Islam and the Sande female secret society, and briefly mentions the Bahá'í Faith in Liberia. It discusses the religious tensions and discriminations in the past and Presidents Charles Taylor, Samuel Doe, and other political leaders' support for Christian principles. It stresses the need for religious freedom and for the separation of Church and state.

The article presents Charles Taylor's critical philosophy of language and it reviews his recent book on the human linguistic capacity. Critical philosophy of language is understood here as a broad (philosophical, social and political) perspective on language characterized by multifaceted concern with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms involved in language use. The paper discusses Taylor's interest in language and philosophy of language, and focuses on his seminal distinction between the 'designative-instrumental' and 'constitutive-expressive' theories of language. In the former theory language is understood within the confines of Cartesian representational epistemology, whereas in the latter language constitutes meaning and shapes human experience (one of the features important for defining the critical approach to philosophy of language). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus at McGill University, is presented. It mentions COVID-19 pandemic and the harrowing murder of George Floyd that transfixed the entire world have laid bare the structural inequalities that impede communal action and highlighted the essential importance of solidarity. It also mentions discrimination, and inequalities, and in favour of the creation of greater channels of communication between people. It discusses exceptional privileges as enjoy and that make life so wonderful and at the same time of the fact that this standard of living.

Video Abstract Transcendence and Immanence: Deciphering Their Relation through the Transcendentals in Aquinas and Kant This article examines the relationship between the conspicuous and complicated terms of transcendence and immanence, which may equally be defined as essentially connected or diametrically opposed. Recent developments in two largely unrelated sets of scholarship—the re-evaluation of secularization, and the relationship between medieval and modern philosophy—provide a helpful means to arrive at a clearer understanding of this challenging problem. Charles Taylor and Jan Aertesn act as foci for these developments, particularly through their respective concerns with epistemic framing in relation to transcendence and immanence, and the role of transcendentals in medieval philosophy. This examination brings these two concepts together, examining the idea of transcendentals offered by both Aquinas, a thinker of the transcendent frame, and Kant, a thinker of the immanent frame. From this juxtaposition, we can offer two contrasting understandings of the relationship between transcendence and immanence from within both the transcendent and immanent frames. Finally, two brief literary examples demonstrate how these two ways of reading transcendence and immanence may be employed in the contextual understanding of religious writing. To understand the unity and division between transcendence and immanence is to better comprehend two primary terms in the study of religion and to appreciate a fundamental development in the history of religion in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to critically re-open the closed structure of news coverage of ethnic minorities by proposing a dialogical model of representation, which evokes mutual understanding across differences through well-crafted narratives of minority experiences. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Taylor, it explores the notion of "dialogue" within journalistic narratives and delineates two dialogical approaches, namely the evaluative articulation of moral values and the polyphonic incorporation of different voices. The former suggests that journalists should employ nuanced languages to situate ethnic minorities' aspirations and experiences in a common "horizon of significance". The latter challenges the hegemonic monologue of an ostensibly objective narration and accentuates the manifold voices from ordinary people, urging the journalists to rethink their positionality as narrators. Two cases are analyzed to reveal how the dialogic representation can be realized in news reporting, calling for a transition from "ethics of inarticulacy" to ethics of care in journalism practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review Valery Chirkov’s “Fundamentals of research on culture and psychology: Theory and methods.” The book is written as a textbook, but clearly takes a position that work in culture and psychology should be “problem-oriented, realist, and case-based” (p. 299). It is an innovative piece that covers philosophical paradigms, planning research, and conducting research. Our review outlines main claims made by the book that are likely provocative to mainstream variable-based research and ones that will likely challenge cultural psychologists. Despite the provocations, we argue that the book is an excellent place to start because, as illustrated through the work of Charles Taylor, Chirkov insinuates generative conversations about moral goods. A complimentary discussion through the purview Slavoj Žižec shows how Chirkov promotes awareness of a potential fetish with research methods that are counter productive and unethical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a reading of Charles Taylor’s “Overcoming Epistemology,” I explore the epistemological enterprise as it relates to the field of public administration. I first consider what “undergoing” epistemology means by categorizing the activities of undergoing into three classes of increasing generality: doing/studying, defining/delineating, and grounding of public administration. I conclude this section by alluding to the dissolution of dualisms in the field in order to resolve the identity of public administration. The various ways of undergoing epistemology point to the interrelationship between Taylor’s epistemological enterprise and a consideration of public administration as a political project. In the section on “overcoming,” I consider a definition of public administration provided by Meier and O’Toole (MOT). As I argue, the MOT definition functions more as a statement of mission for the field of Public Administration than as a disciplinary definition, and this mission is characterized by at least two core values common in modernity: measurability and impersonality. The last two sections of the article explore the implications of these values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions have been accused of losing their moral orientation and failing to provide students with a meaningful educative experience. This paper exposes the roots of this problem within contradictions between two historical commitments of higher education: “serving science” and “know thyself”. The paper then develops a conceptual model of teaching practice as such. The model demonstrates the predominance of “serving science”, which leads to the compromising of ethics and meaning. It is then developed to show how “self” can be explicitly reclaimed by integrating the two epistemologies-ethics in teaching practice. Contemporary pedagogical examples are presented to demonstrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the making of his book "On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement," He took every course that the political philosopher Charles Taylor offered and avoided all International Relations courses except Janice Stein's teaching. He double-down the subtitle of the book to provide a genealogy of the genealogy of estrangements.

Although adjustment after trauma is often positively associated with meaning, some studies challenge this connection (Bonanno, Memory, 21(1), 150-156, 2013; Silver and Updegraff 2013). In this article we elaborate on the relation between existential meaning and resilience. First, we conceptualize existential meaning-searching for and finding meaning in life-in terms of 'orienting in moral space', using the philosophical ideas of Taylor (1989), the psychological meaning-making model of Park ( Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257-301, 2010), and existential theory. We argue that orienting systems in moral space are 'believable visions of the good'. We then search recent literature on resilience-in particular literature in which the connection with meaning is challenged-for indications of a connection with existential meaning. We conclude that resilience necessarily comprises a 'moral dimension' that is an adaptive process of (eventually) finding meaning in life. Finally, we discuss implications for the role that pastoral counselors, as professionals in the domain of existential meaning, may play in promoting resilience in organizations where employees regularly face existential issues like violence, suffering, and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Charles Taylor’sA Secular Agerepresents a remarkable achievement. Taylor insists in a reasoned way that the sacred continues to have an important and legitimate role, and challenges assumptions, whether based on Weberian or Durkheimian understandings of religion in society, that faith no longer has a place. In doing this, he distinguishes among different aspects of the secularisation thesis. In this article I assert that there is a coherence to Taylor’s body of work, includingA Secular Age, and I trace certain themes, such as a concern with notions of the self, that run through his work. I also identify in Taylor’s argument links to the thought of thinkers like Blondel, Gilson, Maritain and Marcel, and to the notion of an apologetics of hope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we explore the possible contributions of empirical moral philosophy to professional ethics in teacher education. We argue that it is both possible and desirable to connect knowledge of how teachers empirically do and understand professional ethics with normative theories of teachers’ professional ethics. Our argument is made in dialogue with the moral philosophy of Charles Taylor and the emerging tradition of ‘empirical ethics’ in psychiatry. We also draw on empirical data from a larger empirical project on teachers’ professional ethics in Norway. Our main contribution is the development of a method for empirical professional ethics that involves three steps: articulation, disturbance and expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that in recent years, the therapeutic ethos and the ideal of authenticity have become aligned with distinctively neo-liberal notions of personal responsibility and self-reliance. This situation has radically exacerbated the threat to political community that Charles Taylor saw in the ‘ethics of authenticity’. I begin by tracing the history of the therapeutic ethos and its early (Rieff, Lasch, MacIntyre) and late (Furedi) critics. I then discuss Charles Taylor’s argument that the culture of self-fulfillment generated by the therapeutic ethos harbors an important moral ideal, namely, the ethic of authenticity. Pace Taylor, I argue that authenticity has now become thoroughly instrumentalized in the service of the guiding political rationality of neo-liberalism. I make this case through a discussion of its uptake in managerial techniques and practices and also in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The famous twentieth-century philosophers Charles Taylor and Michael Dummett have both commented on the Rushdie Affair. This article analyzes their criticism of the British author Salman Rushdie and tries to demonstrate the relevance of this criticism against the backdrop of the massacre in the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015. Unfortunately, two great philosophers of our time do not give us guidance here. The world is confused, our political leaders are confused, and great political philosophers are confused. This is important, because if freedom of expression, thought, and religion are to survive in this world, it is necessary to defend these freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]