Search Results

“... thinking of philosophers like David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (It might also be even harder.) As it is, there seem to be no grounds for optimism at all. For more than a quarter of a century I have found Alasdair MacIntyre the most stirring and the most imaginatively challenging writer on moral and ...”

“... who have more recently thought about the matter (and who do not believe, as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor now do, that in losing an encompassing faith we have lost all capacity to talk about the public good at all) agree that our own present sense of what, exactly, these two more lively kinds of argument for justice now are, and of how we might ...”

“... religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community – and nationality’. Similarly, Charles Taylor reminds Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ...”

“... bright little rooms produces some sort of stain on the moral fabric. But the fact remains, as Charles Taylor once put it, that there is a ‘value-slope’ in our accounts which, if left to itself, without countervailing argument, does tend to commend or condemn. Second, and much more interestingly, Runciman also supposes that ...”

“... the rise of middle-class society, popular democracy and the idea of everyday life. (The latter, Charles Taylor claims, was the invention of Christianity, but it took the modern French intelligentsia to establish it as a kosher intellectual concern.) Authors like Defoe and Richardson emerged from the fledgling middle class’s endless fascination with ...”

“... has been – how natural the narrating of the self appears to be. It is not a modern phenomenon: Charles Taylor has fingered St Augustine as the first great apologist for personal inwardness. Nor is it, as Brooks sometimes implies, just a way of fashioning a subjective space within which we can be all the more cravenly subjected to power. If inwardness ...”

“... a seasonal yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political reality. The philosopher Charles Taylor has remarked that politics is ‘what’s going on’, or something to that effect. But how the hell are we to know what’s going on, I thought while on my way to the Trades Union Congress? What is going on is in some part what we say is ...”

“... they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running around with the shell on its head. As Charles Taylor wrote in A Secular Age, the Reformation was ‘central to … the abolition of the enchanted cosmos and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith’. This is the influential master narrative to whose attempted demolition ...”

“... threshold of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of ‘sympathy’. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that ‘an almost complete ...”

“... to establishing what people’s desires are. Also I suspect that opponents of utilitarianism (like Charles Taylor and T.M. Scanlon in this volume) would reply that this account of utility is so elastic as to make us all utilitarians now. Few people would seriously dispute that moral goals worth pursuing must be acceptable to us at some underlying level of ...”

“... boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is EastEnders. Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in ...”

“... from the wall and rejoice in the décloisonnement dreamt of by left-Hegelian romantics such as Charles Taylor – the Canadian liberal philosopher, not the Liberian warlord – in 1968? Walls maintain a front in the face of ‘waning sovereignty’, a child’s sand-dam thrown up vainly against the tide of history. The late modern state’s lot is to ...”

“... Public opinion, which has now canonised Mandela, would be outraged were a ‘warlord’ such as Charles Taylor not brought to justice, though Taylor gave up power in 2003 when he left Monrovia for exile in Nigeria. In 2006, when the former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano negotiated with Joseph Kony for his ...”

“... his way to power in 1980 when he was 28. One of the cases on my file was that of the TV reporter Charles Gbenyon, who called into question the results of the 1985 elections. Doe had him arrested, stripped and taken to the Executive Mansion. His body later turned up carefully arranged on the beach, with his throat cut, head towards the sea and feet towards ...”

“... that followed. Would it have been the same if it had been a serving despot such as President Charles Taylor of Liberia, whose skeletons are now bursting out of the cupboard? Many Liberians voted for Taylor because they believed that the only way to end the civil war was to choose the biggest warlord as ...”