Meta-narratives of secularization

Abstract

Hegel (1975), Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007) are central milestones in an ambitious intellectual project in which the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has insisted, in response to the question about the conditions of the present that the understanding of it should be articulated philosophically and historically. In Hegel, he stressed the distinction between interpretive and ontological dialectics. In Sources of the Self, he articulated a Philosophical Anthropology rooted in history that in a similar vein used a dual approach: (1) ontological o transcendental, in order to shed light on the constituent aspects of the anthropos, and (2) a Philosophical History, in order to account for the different ways of being a person, a subject or a human agent that have been make over time and the variety of geographies. In A Secular Age, Taylor returns to confront the issue in a renew perspective (the conditions of belief and unbelief in the societies of the North Atlantic in the 21st century) and he stress the need to implement this dual perspective.