Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique of Modernity: Pluralist and Emergentist Directions

by Charles W. Lowney II (Editor)

Overview

This book provides a timely, compelling, multidisciplinary critique of the largely tacit set of assumptions funding Modernity in the West. A partnership between Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor's thought promises to cast the errors of the past in a new light, to graciously show how these errors can be amended, and to provide a specific cartography of how we can responsibly and meaningfully explore new possibilities for ethics, political society, and religion in a post-modern modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319876658
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	06/04/2019
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Charles W. Lowney II is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hollins University, Virginia, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: What a Better Epistemology Can Do For Moral Philosophy

Part I: An Epistemological Revolution

2. Converging Roads around Dilemmas of Modernity

3. Dialogue, Discovery, and an Open Future: Charles Taylor in Conversation

Part Ii: Projects, Possibilities and Challenges

4. The Projects of Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor

5. Authenticity and the Reconciliation of Modernity

6. ‘Transcendence’ In A Secular Age And Enchanted (Un)Naturalism

Part Iii: Toward A New Modernity: Taylor And Polanyi In Conversation

7. Polanyi’s Revolutionary Imaginary

8. Overcoming the Scientistic Imaginary

9. On Emergentist Ethics and Becoming Authentic

10. Taylor and Polanyi on Moral Sources and Social Systems

11. The Importance of Engagement: Taylor, Fennell, Lowney, and Yeager in Conversation

12. Epilogue: Robust Moral Realism: Pluralist or Emergent?

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Charles Lowney has shown here the convergence between the critiques of modern narrow rationalism offered by Michael Polanyi, on one hand, and 20th Century phenomenology (which was my starting point), on the other. A lot of interesting insights become available when these and other critiques are brought into contact. We are all in Lowney's debt for his valuable contribution.” (Charles Taylor, McGill University, author of A Secular Age, Modern Social Imaginaries and Sources of the Self)

“Readers of this collection will be well rewarded. There are two main paths to the task of critiquing modernity, the deconstructive and the reconstructive paths. The authors of the essays comprising this book have wisely chosen the latter, and they do so with clarity, thoroughness, and insight. Professor Lowney should be commended for putting this collection together, as well as for writing several of the essays himself. The various approaches to Michael Polanyi’s thought are especially welcomed.” (Jerry Gill, author of Deep Postmodernism: Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Polanyi, 2010)

“A splendid combination of philosophical erudition and moral sensitivity, this work brings into conversation two of the most important philosophers of our time, Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor. The substantive commentaries, comparisons, and criticisms gathered in this volume offer readers convincing alternatives to the intellectually dubious scientism and corrosive moral relativism of our secular age. Strongly recommended.” (John F. Haught, Georgetown University, author of The New Cosmic Story: Inside Our Awakening Universe , 2017)

“Lowney and his collaborators show that Charles Taylor extends the work of Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene, constituting a powerful alternative form of modernity that avoids the dead end of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures. An important signpost on the road not (yet) taken.” (Lawrence Cahoone, Holy Cross, author of The Orders of Nature (2014), The Dilemma of Modernity (1988), and The Ends of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Foundationalism and Postmodernism , 2002)

“Modern times have tended to be dominated by a Cartesian model that is almost exclusively narrowly rationalistic/intellectualist and reductionist. Two prominent challenges to that view have come from Charles Taylor and Michael Polanyi. The time is surely ripe for a deeper engagement between the two and that this volume undoubtedly provides. Its contributors wrestle with the distinctive notions of each (such as Polanyi’s tacit knowledge and emergent being and Taylor’s authenticity and re-enchantment) to see how far a more integrated and inclusive alternative approach can be created.” (David Brown FBA is Emeritus Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews)