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.

Charles Margrave Taylor was born at Montreal in November 1931 to an English-Canadian father and a francophone Quebec mother and was raised bilingually. He took his bachelor's in history at McGill in 1952, went up to Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and completed his DPhil in 1961 under Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe. He spent his career between McGill, where he was Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy, and Oxford, where he held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory from 1976 to 1981. He has received the Templeton Prize (2007), the Kyoto Prize (2008), and the Berggruen Prize (2016), and co-chaired Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation in 2007–2008.

His major works are The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), Hegel (1975), Hegel and Modern Society (1979), the two volumes of Philosophical Papers (1985), Sources of the Self (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1992), Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), the long A Secular Age (2007), Dilemmas and Connections (2011), The Language Animal (2016), and Cosmic Connections (2024).

Taylor mounted one of the founding communitarian critiques of liberal individualism, recovered the expressivist tradition from Herder and Romanticism as the matrix of modern identity, theorised the politics of recognition for multinational and multicultural states, and in A Secular Age narrated the Western move from a world in which belief was effortless to one in which it has become only one option among many. He combines this work with a lifelong Roman Catholicism and a long association with the Quebec social-democratic left.