Charles Taylor b. 1931

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher and one of the most influential figures in late-twentieth-century political philosophy and the history of ideas. Sources of the Self traced the long history of the modern moral identity from Augustine and the Reformation through the Enlightenment and Romanticism, while The Ethics of Authenticity and Multiculturalism gave a sympathetic but critical defense of the modern ideal of authentic selfhood and the politics of recognition. His monumental A Secular Age narrated the long historical and conceptual transformations through which a society in which it was almost impossible not to believe in God became one in which belief is one option among others.