Canadian philosopher; for sixty years one of the major living philosophers writing in English, and the figure within late-20th-century political philosophy who has most consistently insisted that the secularized analytic tradition's self-understanding is much narrower and more provincial than its practitioners have noticed. Taylor was educated at McGill and Oxford (where he was the first Rhodes Scholar to write a doctoral thesis on a philosopher who wrote in German — Hegel), taught for decades at McGill and as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, and stood three times unsuccessfully as the New Democratic Party's candidate for parliament in his Montreal riding. He is a practicing Catholic of the post-Vatican II generation, and the religious dimension of human life has been central rather than incidental to his philosophical work.
His early Hegel (1975) is a thousand-page reconstruction that helped make Hegel intelligible to English-language philosophers in a generation that had largely written him off. Sources of the Self (1989) is his major statement: a five-hundred-page genealogy of the modern Western moral identity, tracing how the contemporary Western self — committed to the affirmation of ordinary life, the dignity of inwardness, the language of authenticity, and the moral importance of expressive self-realization — was constructed across centuries from sources (Augustine, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism) most of whose original frameworks the modern self has discarded. The book argues, against subjectivist readings of modern morality, that the moral commitments of contemporary liberals are unintelligible without recovery of the historical sources that originally underwrote them.
The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) compressed parts of the argument for a wider audience. Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" (1992) became one of the central texts of the multiculturalism debate of the 1990s. A Secular Age (2007), the eight-hundred-page book of his later career, is the major philosophical account of how Western societies moved within five hundred years from a condition in which belief in God was nearly impossible to disbelieve to one in which it is, for many people, nearly impossible to take seriously — and what was lost and gained in the transition. Taylor's communitarianism, like MacIntyre's and Sandel's, rejects the picture of the self as a freestanding rational chooser; unlike them, Taylor's version is generous to liberal modernity even as it diagnoses its costs.