The Language Animal

At 85 years of age, Charles Taylor has (remarkably) published yet another remarkable book. Last year he also published a book on epistemology with Hubert Dreyfus entitled Retrieving Realism. Taylor is of course best known for two tomes, Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007), which seek to comprehend our modern predicament and offer a way forward. In The Language Animal, we find Taylor coming back to his fundamental concern with philosophical anthropology and his view that an accurate account of language and its powers is integral to a proper understanding of human life. The concern with philosophical anthropology goes back to his first book, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), and his developing account of the significance of language in human life can be found in parts of Hegel (1975) and Sources of the Self, and in a number of essays, most of which have been published in Human Agency and Language (1985), Philosophical Arguments (1995), and Dilemmas and Connections (2011). But The Language Animal provides the most extended and systematic treatment of these matters, and thus it is the crowning achievement of this central strand of Taylor's philosophical work.

Agency (philosophy) · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Human language · Human science · Linguistics · Metaphysics · On Language · Philosophy of language · Realism · Sociology · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy