PERSON
Charles Taylor
Canadian philosopher (b. 1931) whose sixty-year project of rescuing modern moral frameworks from both their defenders and their critics produced the architecture that the AI age most urgently needs.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) is a Canadian philosopher widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the modern era. Born in Montreal to a bilingual Catholic family, he studied at McGill and then at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, completing his doctorate under Isaiah Berlin and Elizabeth Anscombe. He spent most of his career at McGill with extended periods at Oxford and Northwestern. His major works include Sources of the Self (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), A Secular Age (2007), The Language Animal (2016), and Cosmic Connections (2024). He received the Templeton Prize in 2007 and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Taylor's philosophical project has been distinguished by its refusal of the standard oppositions that structure contemporary academic discourse. He has refused the opposition between analytic and continental philosophy, drawing on both traditions throughout his career. He has refused the opposition between religious and secular worldviews, writing from within Catholic commitment while providing the most sympathetic