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A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year<BR><BR>A major new work by Charles Taylor: the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal, exploring the Romantic poetics central to his theory of language.<BR><BR>The Language Animal, Charles Taylor's 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor's exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.<BR><BR>Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor's magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Mi¿osz, and beyond.<BR><BR>In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving-too obviously true-to be ignored.

"Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live...and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader." -Martha Nussbaum, New Republic<BR><BR>In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led-it seems to many-to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.<BR><BR>The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor's goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year<BR>A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year<BR>A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year<BR>A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year<BR>A Tablet Best Book of the Year<BR>Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award<BR><BR>"One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society." -The Economist<BR><BR>What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we-in the West, at least-largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean-of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.<BR><BR>Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion-although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined-but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.<BR><BR>What this means for the world-including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence-is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

23:B&W 6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Perfect Bound on White w/Gloss Lam

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23:B&W 6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Perfect Bound on White w/Gloss Lam