Taylor Charles (b.1931), Canadian philosopher and historian of modernity. Taylor was educated at McGill and Oxford and has taught primarily at these universities. His work has a broadly analytic character, although he has consistently opposed the naturalistic and reductionist tendencies that were associated with the positivist domination of analytic philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. He was, for example, a strong opponent of behaviorism and defended the essentially interpretive nature of the social sciences against efforts to reduce their methodology to that of the natural sciences. Taylor has also done important work on the histiory of philosophy, particularly on Hegel, and has connected his work with that of Continental philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. He has contributed to political theory and written on contemporary political issues such as multiculturalism (in, e.g., The Ethics of Authenticity, 1991), often with specific reference to Canadian politics. He has also taken an active political role in Quebec. Taylor’s most important work, Sources of the Self (1989), is a historical and critical study of the emergence of the modern concept of the self. Like many other critics of modernity, Taylor rejects modern tendencies to construe personal identity in entirely scientific or naturalistic terms, arguing that these construals lead to a view of the self that can make no sense of our undeniable experience of ourselves as moral agents. He develops this critique in a historical mode through discussion of the radical Enlightenment’s (e.g., Locke’s) reduction of the self to an atomic individual, essentially disengaged from everything except its own ideas and desires. But unlike many critics, Taylor also finds in modernity other, richer sources for a conception of the self. These include the idea of the self’s inwardness, traceable as far back as Augustine but developed in a distinctively modern way by Montaigne and Descartes; the affirmation of ordinary life (and of ourselves as participants in it), particularly associated with the Reformation; and the expressivism (of, e.g., the Romantics) for which the self fulfills itself by embracing and articulating the voice of nature present in its depths. Taylor thinks that these sources constitute a modern self that, unlike the ‘punctual self’ of the radical Enlightenment, is a meaningful ethical agent. He suggests, nonetheless, that an adequate conception of the modern self will further require a relation of human inwardness to God. This suggestion so far remains undeveloped.
See also ENLIGHTENMENT, PERSONAL IDEN- TITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIN. G.G. Harriet (1807–58), English feminist and writer. She was the wife of J. S. Mill, who called her the ‘most admirable person’ he had ever met; but according to her critics, Taylor was ‘a stupid woman’ with ‘a knack for repeating prettily what J.S.M. said.’ Although Mill may have exaggerated her moral and intellectual virtues, her writings on marriage, the enfranchisement of women, and toleration did influence his Subjection of Women and On Liberty. In The Enfranchisement of Women, Taylor rejected the reigning ‘angel in the house’ ideal of woman. She argued that confining women to the house impeded both sexes’ development. Taylor was a feminist philosopher in her own right, who argued even more strongly than Mill that women are entitled to the same educational, legal, and economic opportunities that men enjoy. R.T.