PERSON
Charles Taylor
The Canadian philosopher who spent sixty years rescuing modern moral frameworks from both their defenders and their detractors, arguing that the ideals of authenticity, self-expression, and recognition are genuine goods that have been corrupted into shallow substitutes—and that the AI moment brings their corruption to a crisis.
Charles Taylor is the philosopher of what modernity has lost without knowing it. His six-decade project—running from
The Explanation of Behaviour (1964) through
Sources of the Self (1989) and
A Secular Age (2007) to
Cosmic Connections (2024)—is neither a defense of modernity nor an attack on it but a sustained attempt to recover the moral sources that the modern framework requires but has allowed to atrophy. The
culture of authenticity—the dominant moral framework of contemporary Western life, the conviction that each person possesses an original way of being human that it is their highest calling to discover and express—is, Taylor argues, a genuine moral achievement that has been degraded into a shallow subjectivism. The
expressivist turn in our understanding of creative work was a real insight that has been corrupted into the imperative to produce, perform, and self-optimize. The
three malaises of modernity—the loss of meaning through radical