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“... Charles Taylor is, by his own admission, a hedgehog. Though the essays in these two volumes range over a variety of topics – the concept of a person, meaning, the value of cognitive psychology, sexuality as a mode of political control – they all argue for one basic idea: that the conceptions of objectivity and scientific method which we have inherited from the 17th century are unable to give us an account of ourselves ...”

“... it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful books produced by representatives of ‘the human potential ...”

“... still doesn’t have electricity or running water. It hasn’t had any since February 1990, when Charles Taylor – former warlord, later president, currently in exile in Nigeria, where he’s still causing trouble, according to the Coalition for International Justice, funding armed groups and political parties across West Africa – sent his militia to ...”

“... Liberia had just emerged from another devastating civil conflict, in which the current President, Charles Taylor, played a leading role. A former Government minister who fell out with the military regime of Samuel Doe, Taylor managed to escape from a Massachusetts jail in 1985: he was being held pending extradition on ...”

“... which involved not only Thompson, Saville and Samuel, but also Stuart Hall and the philosopher Charles Taylor. The two merged in 1960 to become the still thriving New Left Review, and for more than ten years after the Partisan’s closure the NLR enjoyed rent-free ...”

“... powerful statements, and the points of view they express clash head-on. The lectures were given by Charles Taylor (‘Philosophy and its History’ and by Richard Rorty (‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’). They disagree not just over the ‘relation of philosophy to its history’ but in their conception of the kind of society we live in ...”

“... she failed to ‘understand what they’re waiting for’. But it was plain enough – Bush wanted Charles Taylor to pack his bags and the whole Liberian mess to go away. The fighting was already intense when Bush embarked on an African tour, committing the United States to what could become a long drawn-out campaign against terrorism on the ...”

“... Five of the 12 essayists – Michael Dummett, P.F. Strawson, David Pears, D.M. Armstrong and Charles Taylor – are concerned with these or with closely related questions. Collectively – taken together with those earlier writings of Ayer on which these essays are a commentary and with Ayer’s reply at the end of this book – they constitute an ...”

“... not ruined by redevelopment, or having friends with a sense of humor? One great virtue of Charles Taylor’s discussion of our values is that it escapes the narrowness of what is conventionally thought to be moral, and looks much more broadly. Another notable advance is that he goes beyond merely stating intuitions, and both shows how they used ...”

“... evokes the early days of Oxford analytic philosophy and Berlin’s perceptive involvement with it; Charles Taylor discusses the legacy of Herder to contemporary philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language. I wish there had been more reminiscence and personal response from some of the contributors. Berlin’s pervasive sense of the comic and absurd ...”

“... events don’t explain why Rawls and Dworkin and others wrote what they did. Those of us who, as Charles Taylor put it in Sources of the Self, ‘feel particularly strongly the demand for universal justice and beneficence, are particularly sensitive to the claims of equality, feel the demands to freedom and self-rule as axiomatically justified, and put ...”

“... to the other – such as Alan Montefiore, who contributes a useful introduction to this book, and Charles Taylor – is perhaps chiefly important for the evidence it affords of deep-seated resistance to mutual understanding. Vincent Descombes’s new book is therefore timely, particularly as it is the most comprehensive and the most philosophically acute ...”

“... of power has been eliminated. He even considers this question – the question raised by Habermas, Charles Taylor and Walzer – ‘silly’. In his view, Foucault’s real difficulty lay in the fact that the ‘strategic’ analysis of power relations did not allow him to answer a different question: how can one resist force? If you are powerless, you ...”

“... Enlightenment, though he has changed his positive allegiances a good deal; Michael Sandel, like Charles Taylor and Pope John Paul II, makes a great thing of ‘identity’. They stress the difference between the way we are ‘constituted’ by our membership in a variety of communities and the ‘abstract’ individuals that thinkers obsessed with ...”

“... pertinent “-ation”.’ These claims are ambitious, amounting to an alternative account of what Charles Taylor calls the ‘sources of the self’. Like Taylor, Yovel is a philosophy professor, and his starting point is a philosophical account of modernity: Hegel, the philosopher of modernity par excellence, placed ...”