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The Ethics of Authenticity
About This Book
"Charles Taylor is a philosopher of broad reach and many talents, but his most striking talent is a gift for interpreting different traditions, cultures and philosophies to one anotherā¦[This book is] full of good things." ā New York Times Book Review Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity's challenges."The great merit of Taylor's brief, non-technical, powerful bookā¦is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are socialā¦Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other peopleā¦The core of Taylor's argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that 'respect for difference' requires you to respect every human being, and every human cultureāno matter how vicious or stupid."
āRichard Rorty, London Review of Books
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1. Three Malaises
- Chapter 2. The Inarticulate Debate
- Chapter 3. The Sources of Authenticity
- Chapter 4. Inescapable Horizons
- Chapter 5. The Need for Recognition
- Chapter 6. The Slide to Subjectivism
- Chapter 7. La Lotta Continua
- Chapter 8. Subtler Languages
- Chapter 9. An Iron Cage?
- Chapter 10. Against Fragmentation
- Notes
- Index