In this chapter, Taylor wants to explore the background conditions that motivated the shift to Providential Diesm. He is here, reacting against a common “subtraction story” that wants to claim that it was “Science” and “Reason” that made people reject orthodox forms of Christianity, and adopt Deism and later, materialist atheism, in its place. Taylor … Continue reading Chapter 7: The Impersonal Order
In Loving Memory. August 6, 1965 - August 6, 2020.
In this chapter Taylor is trying to give an account of how “an exclusive humanism became a life option for large numbers of people, first among the elites, and then more generally.” As we discussed in previous chapters, exclusive humanism is an account of the good life with no recourse to Transcendence. The motivation and … Continue reading Chapter 6: Providential Deism
In this brief chapter, Taylor wants to defend himself against a possible charge of “idealism;” that his history of the transformation of the social imaginary gives undue causal power to ideas. This is contrasted with materialist explanations, which claim that material motivations (money, power, means to life) are more dominant in history than ideal motivations. … Continue reading Chapter 5: The Spectre of Idealism
This is Taylor’s most detailed and complex chapter yet and my summery will necessarily leave a lot out. I suppose this goes for all of the Chapters I have summarized so far, reading Taylor is like drinking from a firehose. In this chapter Taylor is interested in describing the modern social imaginaries, he gives an … Continue reading Chapter 4: Modern Social Imaginaries
Coffee with Kierkegaard 