March 14 | People
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Renowned Philosopher Awarded Templeton Prize
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Charles Taylor |
Awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Prize is the world's largest annual monetary award. The 2007 Templeton Prize will be officially awarded to Taylor by HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 2.
Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern and professor emeritus of philosophy at McGill University in Montréal, has argued for more than half a century that both secular and spiritual dimensions must be considered to solve problems such as violence and bigotry.
The role of spiritual thinking in the 21st century is central to Taylor's work. He argues that depending solely on secularized viewpoints to understand complex problems prevents crucial insights that might help a global community increasingly exposed to clashes of culture, morality, nationalities and religions.
Taylor spoke of the urgent need for insight into the human propensity for violence during a press conference announcing his prize in New York March 14. Such an understanding must take "a full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion," he said.
Barriers between the secular and the spiritual are ungrounded, and one without the other can lead to peril, according to Taylor. "The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both," he said. Equally true, he stressed, the culture of the humanities and social sciences also has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual.
By denying the full account of how and why humans strive for meaning, he noted in his talk, it is impossible to solve the world's most intractable problems, ranging from mob violence to racism to war. The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual greatly affects the culture of the media and of educated public opinion in general, he said.
Taylor also pointed out the need to understand the use of moral certitude or religious beliefs in justifying righteous violence and religious dynamics that become the basis of quasi-nationalist political mobilization. Neither those on the spiritual side of the divide or those on the secular side, regardless of beliefs, are immune from being recruited to group violence. He suggested that the benefits as well as dangers of religious dynamics need to be understood in a way that the old framework of secularization hid from sight.
The first Canadian to win the Templeton Prize, Taylor recently was appointed by Jean Charest, the premier of Quebec, to co-chair a commission on accommodation of cultural religious differences in public life. He said that he will use the prize money to advance his studies of the relationship of language and linguistic meaning to art and theology and to develop new concepts of relating human sciences with biological sciences.
Taylor has a joint appointment as a professor of law at the School of Law and as a professor of philosophy at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. Prior to joining Northwestern, he taught in the political science and philosophy departments at McGill University.
He is author of more than a dozen books and scores of published essays. He is currently working on topics in social and political theory having to do with multiculturalism, secularization and alternative modernities. He has a strong interest in the role of law in political theory, and his work covers topics including the history of philosophy, truth, theism, interpretation, the human sciences, liberalism, pluralism and difference. He has studied and written about the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, the modern understanding of the self and the philosophy of Hegel.
In 1992 the Quebec provincial government awarded Professor Taylor the Prix Léon-Gérin, the highest honor given for contribution to Quebec intellectual life, and in 2000 he was named a grand officer de l'Ordre national du Quebec. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the British Academy and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Taylor holds a bachelor of arts degree from McGill University, as well as a master's degree and Ph.D. (D.Phil.) from Oxford University.
The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life's biggest questions. These questions range from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity.
QUOTES ABOUT CHARLES TAYLOR, 2007 TEMPLETON PRIZE
"Charles Taylor truly is one of the most influential thinkers of our day," said David Van Zandt, dean, School of Law. "We are thrilled that he is getting the recognition he deserves for the remarkable depth and scope of his scholarship. He is able to bring together work that crosses a wide range of disciplines, and we are grateful that our students have the opportunity to learn from him and gain such an important interdisciplinary perspective."
"We have been extremely privileged to have Charles Taylor on our faculty over the last seven years," said Daniel Linzer, dean, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "As a result, our undergraduate and graduate students have had the good fortune to work with one of the greatest living philosophers. In his teaching on ethics, political theory and contemporary philosophy, Taylor is known for challenging his students to engage deeply with a broad range of philosophical texts, using his own critical methods as a guide."
"Charles Taylor's vision is that the traditional religious ideals of the West and the highest aspirations of modern society should be understood as a continuum with one another and not in conflict," said Robert Burns, professor, School of Law.
"Charles Taylor is one of the few contemporary thinkers fluent in both analytic and continental traditions in philosophy," said Dilip Gaonkar, associate professor of communication studies. "His contributions to political and social theory, religion and aesthetics have had an abiding influence on scholars in those fields. And as an model public intellectual, he has engaged and intervened in a variety of public debates on pressing issues. A prize of this magnitude was long over due."
"Charles Taylor is without question one of the two or three most important social philosophers in the world today," said Keith Topper, associate professor of communication studies. "Combining a profound moral imagination with acute sensitivity to the diverse ways in which human beings find meaning in their world, he has fundamentally altered the manner in which philosophers, social scientists and many sectors of the educated public think about issues of politics, ethics, religion, secularization, cultural pluralism, human identity and human understanding."
"Throughout his career, Charles Taylor has staked an often lonely position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in discussions of public policy, history, linguistics, literature and every other facet of humanities and the social sciences," said John M. Templeton, Jr., president, John Templeton Foundation. "Through careful analysis, impeccable scholarship and powerful, passionate language, he has given us bold new insights that provide a fresh understanding of the many problems of the world and, potentially, how we might together resolve them."
In his nomination of Charles Taylor for the 2007 Templeton Prize, the Rev. David A. Martin, emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and author of "A General Theory of Secularization," said, "His oeuvre is massive and covers issues quite central to contemporary concerns, above all perhaps the nature of self-hood and the religious and secular options open to us in what is sometimes described as secular or even secularist society. He has traced the historical evolution of the religious and secular dimensions of the world as they relate to each other with unequalled authority."