Dialogic Life: Charles Taylor and The Ethics of Authenticity: An Introduction and Guide

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is best known for major studies on Hegel, for Sources of the Self (1989), a study of the development of modern identity, and A Secular Age (2007), based on the 1999 Gifford Lectures. The Ethics of Authenticity was originally given as a series of lectures on Canadian Radio, and entitled ‘The Malaise of Modernity’, and Taylor’s concerns are to make a critique of modernity, highlighting worrying trends in the development of individualism and what he terms ‘instrumental reason’ and the subsequent ‘loss of freedom’. For all his criticisms, Taylor also wants to retrieve the ethical theme of authenticity, seen in terms of people being true to themselves, but with a restored sense of life being dialogic in character, and lived against the cultural framework of ‘horizons of intelligibility’.

Written for those coming to the study of Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Dialogic Life provides an introduction and guide to Taylor’s thought and a commentary and review of the text. The opening chapter reviews Taylor’s life and the development of his thought, and subsequent chapters (2-11) provide a commentary and guide to the ten sections of The Ethics Authenticity. The final two chapters discuss issues arising and offer conclusions on Taylor’s work to retrieve and restore the ethical ideal of authenticity.

Stephen Loxton retired from a 40-year teaching career in 2019. He now devotes his time to independent research and writing. He worked at a range of schools in the UK, including Millfield, The Godolphin School, and Sherborne School for Girls, where he ran a highly successful I.B. Philosophy course. He has written about twenty school timetables, run Philosophy and Religious Studies Departments, been a Deputy Headmaster, an ISI Inspector, and chaired the Salisbury Local Research Ethics Committee in the 1990s, approving the first clinical trials of the drug Sildenafil, later better known as Viagra. Dialogic Life is his sixth book. Previous books include three guides to topics for A level Philosophy of Religion, on Plato and Aristotle, Conscience and Religious Language. Words and Deeds (2018; revised edition in 2020) is an introduction to the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche and the Old Flame (2021) is a study of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. In preparation is Proper Guardians, an introduction and guide to J.S. Mill’s On Liberty.