Rating: 
Summary: Philosophy you can read and maybe even understand!!!
Review: After having long-suffered the hyped-up mumbojumbo of all that post-structuralist goobledegook and/or boring and infuriating cryptophila that has been running rampant in philosophy for years now, it's always a pleasure to find a book of philosophy filled with complex and beautiful ideas that you can actually read and perhaps even understand. Not that it's always an easy task grasping the multitude of relationships between the ideas that he outlines as constituting our notions of modern selfhood. But since such an undertaking is expressed so eloquently and thoroughly in this sprawling tome, "Sources of the Self" seems more than worth the trouble. If, like me, you're tired of all those knuckleheads spouting mindless half-understood deconstructionist platitudes and whatnot...buy this book! Taylor is good...damn good!
Rating:
Summary: moral phenomenology
Review: Ethics/morality always seems to be relegated to a marginal position, not because it isn't important, but because, as John Searle might say "it's too damn hard." So instead the focus falls on epistemological or metaphysical foundations with the promise that when we get such foundations cleared up we will start worry about ethics and politics. The problem is our easy division of labor is a false illusion: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics - every position we take is a little of each of those and never only one sigle category or motivation. Ethics informs aesthetics informing epistemology informing politics, etc.
Taylor admits to such and rejects the foundational project, seeking instead historical understanding. What options do we have here and now based on our historicity? How has history made us what we are and how we think? Thus the larger second part of this book tells a historical story of how we got here and what options we can realistically choose from.
It is the smaller first part, the attempt to phenomenologically describe moral polarization, that seems to me to be of even greater philosophical import. Instead of pretending we don't have ethical motivations or pretending we can get to a point beyond good and evil, Taylor argues we are always polarized (Merleau-Ponty talk) by moral understandings. This is refreshing because if this description is accurate, we cannot realistically leave off ethical concerns while we establish solid foundational epistemologies. There is no avoiding ethics!
I highly recommend this important book. I also recommend Taylor's other work.
Rating:
Summary: Por fin
Review: Por fin alguien nos explicó lo que nos perdimos mientras dormiamos en clase de filosofía. Sigue así
Rating:
Summary: "immersion" course in the ideas
Review: Someone told philosophy is simply a specific genre of European literature; I would tend to agree if permitted to add that to validate itself as "philosophy" the opus has to include references to the previous philosophical works. Otherwise, however similar in vein and content, a book of philosophy it will not be.
According to that definition philosophers are writers doomed to retell stories heard from their predecessors; far is the day when the Allegory of the Cave will drop off that rambling and overburdened philosophical cart (driven by the Buridan donkey, no doubt) and be moved out of readers' sight.
Whether this definition is true or not, Taylor in his book behaves exactly as described, repeating and condensing others' treatises and opinions. They are many in the long history of our civilization, so the author's tactic is to find connecting "narratives": here is the great "Inward Turn", from which premises of Romanticism easily follow, there came "veneration of the ordinary", which brought about the phenomenon of the modern novel.
It is precisely in this that both the greatest weakness of the oevre and its greatest utility lie: the book has collected innumerable praises from the horde of us, intellectual sloths, for in it we immediately spotted the opportunity to use the results of this marvellous compression, with the narratives as aids to jog our lazy memories, without reading the whole philosophical library of Taylor's sources shelf after shelf, and cover to cover.
The weakness of the approach could be in a certain arbitrariness of the found stories and connections. They make what was announced as "history of the central terms on which the modern man appreciates himself" seem too logical and inevitable. Those threads or constantly developing themes, when historical rather than invented, could be simultaneous, interweaving and interplaying - not consecutive and orderly.
In short, they are patterns half discerned and half imposed on history and philosophy by Taylor himself.
The second peculiarity of the book is the Taylor's style.
Once, they say, physisists came to a University bursar to ask for funds. The bursar studied their proposal for a long time, and then complained: "It's always like this with you, physisists. You always ask for huge sums to do your experiments. Mathematicians are so much better! All they use is paper, pencils and erasers." Then he thought a bit and added: "And philosophers are best of all. They do not even need erasers."
Taylor's style is unnecessarily dense and repetitive. I had an impression that he was more engrossed in wording than in laying out logically when writing. Very often, when the thread has been followed through to the very end, one realises, it could have been greatly reduced, and reduced to almost a platitude, I caught myself thinking at times: yes, "the original unity" of religious worldview was shattered and became multiple disciplines in modernity, emergence of protestant churches is habitually used to explain the Western individualism et cetera et cetera et cetera.
The "difficulty" of the book may be in the density of its style, and not always in the subject matter being discussed.
But still...
they say laziness is the King and true source of all Good in the world, so I cannot help but give the deserved 5 stars to this crash "immersion" course in the ideas of Western philosophy (in the guise of a treatise about Good, Ethics and sources of Modernity), nicely condensed and organized in a number of stories to follow for a curious reader but less than dedicated philosopher.
Digesting the Taylor's tome is the easiest way to read one book and then be able to convincingly claim to know many, many more.
Rating:
Summary: From community to self- and the evolution of ethics...
Review: Taylor is an important voice in today's philosophical community- one that refuses to give in to the excesses of either postmodern relativism or extreme conservatism. Instead, with "Sources of the Self", (expanding on "The Ethics of Authenticity"), he's written an important summary of the evolution of moral ideas from the ancient virtue-hierarchies of the Greeks, through the communitarian great chain of medieval philosophy, to the independent "I" of modernity. In doing so, he explains the strengths of modern ethics:
-the "hypergoods" of liberty, equality, and freedom of expression.
-the "sanctification" of ordinary life (esp. as it stems from the Protestant reformation)
-the pursuit of scientific inquiry and it's benefits to modern life.
He also, however, points out the problems that occur when modernity's "focus" on the self turns into the narcissistic "obsession" with self of the Romantics and postmodernists.
I highly recommend this book to philosophical liberals as one of the best defenses of modern liberalism in print, to scholars of philosophy as an important history of the evolution of the idea of the self, and to fans of the works of Jurgen Habermas and Ken Wilber, both of whom also deal extensively with issues tackled in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Sources, not answers
Review: Taylor offers us an invigorating critique of the Western individualist tradition since the 17th century. His work focuses on how the Judeo-Christian tradition has been dismantled bit-by-bit as rationality has taken its place. This dynamic has left us with a "desiccated" self (e.g., no role for spirituality or grace). Taylor tells us that what is missing are powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of ordinary life, but he does not reconcile these with the developments he critiques. Instead of sending us back to our religious roots or offering a new perspective, he leaves us asking the question we had on page 1: what gives life meaning in the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: Sources, not answers
Review: Taylor offers us an invigorating critique of the Western individualist tradition since the 17th century. His work focuses on how the Judeo-Christian tradition has been dismantled bit-by-bit as rationality has taken its place. This dynamic has left us with a "desiccated" self (e.g., no role for spirituality or grace). Taylor tells us that what is missing are powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of ordinary life, but he does not reconcile these with the developments he critiques. Instead of sending us back to our religious roots or offering a new perspective, he leaves us asking the question we had on page 1: what gives life meaning in the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: Tapestry of philosophies with flashes of brilliance
Review: Taylor took two years to write this book; it took me nearly as long to read it! It is a five-part tome of 525 pages of text and 71 pages of footnotes. In this entire collection I cannot remember a single section that could be read without my complete concentration. Quiet and solitude are minimal prerequisites before tackling this book - a good grasp of the history of philosophy wouldn't hurt either.The sources to which Taylor refers are the moral ideals, ideas, and understandings that have dominated in various historical eras. Taylor's basic premise is rather simple, "we are only our selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good (p. 34)." His purpose is not to specify the good, that is, he does not seek to set normative definitions or qualifications. His purpose is to show that self-definition requires a framework in which to be understood. The historical course of his narrative begins with the classical perspective. In this view, self was dependent on a vision of the True or the Ideal. The hierarchical nature of reality presupposed in classical thought meant that self-definition was subservient to the whole. Traditional Christian thought embraced the classical perspective and the preference for self-definition by externals. Obviously, this short sketch of classical thought seems to be absurdly irrelevant in our contemporary world. Self is definitely not defined in relation to externals, but by an extreme interiority, complete rejection of hierarchical schemes, and the assumption that reality is defined empirically rather than conceptually. This book traces the transformation of the classical perspective through history in each of these areas: the movement toward inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and the voice of nature. I found Taylor's historical analysis of more value than his contemporary application; however, I have to admit that the latter was quite difficult for me to follow due to my lack of exposure to the material. In essence he claims that the near universal adoption of benevolence and justice as our predominant ethical values have insufficient foundation. Radical subjectivity, radical equality, and radical acceptance of nature do not provide a horizon capable of defending contemporary values. Even though Taylor stops short of offering an external standard, his thorough critique of contemporary inconsistencies is excellent. I cannot really recommend this book to everyone because it is clearly written to a graduate audience. If you are not well-read in philosophy, theology, or psychology, it may not be worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Tapestry of philosophies with flashes of brilliance
Review: Taylor took two years to write this book; it took me nearly as long to read it! It is a five-part tome of 525 pages of text and 71 pages of footnotes. In this entire collection I cannot remember a single section that could be read without my complete concentration. Quiet and solitude are minimal prerequisites before tackling this book - a good grasp of the history of philosophy wouldn't hurt either. The sources to which Taylor refers are the moral ideals, ideas, and understandings that have dominated in various historical eras. Taylor's basic premise is rather simple, "we are only our selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good (p. 34)." His purpose is not to specify the good, that is, he does not seek to set normative definitions or qualifications. His purpose is to show that self-definition requires a framework in which to be understood. The historical course of his narrative begins with the classical perspective. In this view, self was dependent on a vision of the True or the Ideal. The hierarchical nature of reality presupposed in classical thought meant that self-definition was subservient to the whole. Traditional Christian thought embraced the classical perspective and the preference for self-definition by externals. Obviously, this short sketch of classical thought seems to be absurdly irrelevant in our contemporary world. Self is definitely not defined in relation to externals, but by an extreme interiority, complete rejection of hierarchical schemes, and the assumption that reality is defined empirically rather than conceptually. This book traces the transformation of the classical perspective through history in each of these areas: the movement toward inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and the voice of nature. I found Taylor's historical analysis of more value than his contemporary application; however, I have to admit that the latter was quite difficult for me to follow due to my lack of exposure to the material. In essence he claims that the near universal adoption of benevolence and justice as our predominant ethical values have insufficient foundation. Radical subjectivity, radical equality, and radical acceptance of nature do not provide a horizon capable of defending contemporary values. Even though Taylor stops short of offering an external standard, his thorough critique of contemporary inconsistencies is excellent. I cannot really recommend this book to everyone because it is clearly written to a graduate audience. If you are not well-read in philosophy, theology, or psychology, it may not be worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: A Substantive Theory of the Good
Review: Taylor would like to revitalize the ancients' emphasis on what he calls a substantive theory of the good. This he contrasts with a procedural conception of ethics that he ties to certain elements of Modernism. In particular, Taylor takes on modern ethical systems for being too focused on obligation rather than what he terms the "hypergood."
It is not a simple call for revisiting classical philosophy. Taylor is doing more than trying to draw attention to what he sees as wrong turns and misguided focuses in modern ethical thinking. There is a constructive element to the work.
It is not an introductory piece and many would find the depth of references frustrating. For those who have not read many works to which he refers (e.g. Locke, Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Williams) or who cannot distinguish a Kantian from a utilitarian, etc. it might be a bit of a slog. For ethicists or anyone interested in philosophical issues of identity, self, or conceptions of the common good, it is clearly a very important work.
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