Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, intellectual history. This work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, the John W. Kluge Prize. In 2007, Taylor served with Gérard Bouchard on the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation with regard to cultural differences in the province of Quebec, he has made contributions to moral philosophy, hermeneutics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action. Charles Margrave Taylor was born in Montreal, Quebec, on November 5, 1931, to a francophone mother and an anglophone father by whom he was raised bilingually, he attended Selwyn House School from 1941 to 1946 and began his undergraduate education at McGill University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1952.
He continued his studies at the University of Oxford, first as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, receiving a BA degree with first-class honours in philosophy and economics in 1955, as a postgraduate student, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1961 under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin. As an undergraduate student, he started one of the first campaigns to ban thermonuclear weapons in the United Kingdom in 1956, serving as the first president of the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he succeeded John Plamenatz as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and became a Fellow of All Souls College. For many years, both before and after Oxford, he was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, where he is now professor emeritus. Taylor was a Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston, for several years after his retirement from McGill. Taylor was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.
In 1991, Taylor was appointed to the Conseil de la langue française in the province of Quebec, at which point he critiqued Quebec's commercial sign laws. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. In 2003, he was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's Gold Medal for Achievement in Research, the council's highest honour, he was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities, which included a cash award of US$1.5 million. In 2007 he and Gérard Bouchard were appointed to head a one-year commission of inquiry into what would constitute reasonable accommodation for minority cultures in his home province of Quebec. In June 2008, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category; the Kyoto Prize is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Nobel. In 2015, he was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a prize he shared with philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural $1-million Berggruen Prize for being "a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity." In order to understand Taylor's views, it is helpful to understand his philosophical background his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Taylor rejects formalist epistemology, he is part of an influential intellectual tradition of Canadian idealism that includes John Watson, Paxton Young, C. B. Macpherson, George Grant. In his essay "To Follow a Rule", Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, what kind of knowledge it is that allows a person to follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign; the intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions, we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions. Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background.
This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life". More Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits and tendencies. Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Polanyi, Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is mediated by representations, it is only against an unarticulated background. On occasion we do follow rules by explicitly representing them to ourselves, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application: application requires that we draw on an unarticulated understanding or "sense of things"—the background. Taylor defines naturalism as a family of various quite diverse theories that all hold "the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences."Philosophically, naturalism was popularized and defended by the unity of science movement, advanced by logical positivist philosophy.
In many ways, Taylor's early philosophy springs from a critical reaction against the logical positivism and naturalism, ascendant in Oxford while he was a student. Much of Taylor's philosophical work consisted of careful conceptual critiques of various naturalist research programs; this began with his 1964 dissertation The Explanation of Behaviour, a detailed and sys
Robert N. Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion. Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in social relations with a concentration in social anthropology, his undergraduate honors thesis won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was published in 1952 with the title Apache Kinship Systems. Bellah graduated from Harvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program, with Talcott Parsons and John Pelzel as his advisors, respectively. Bellah first encountered the work of Talcott Parsons as an undergraduate when his senior honors thesis advisor was David Aberle, a former student of Parsons. Parsons was specially interested in Bellah's concept of religious evolution and the concept of "civil religion", they remained intellectual friends until Parsons' death in 1979. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1955.
His doctoral dissertation was titled Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan and was an extension of Weber's Protestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published as Tokugawa Religion in 1957. While an undergraduate at Harvard, Bellah was a member of the Communist Party USA from 1947 to 1949 and a chairman of the John Reed Club, "a recognized student organization concerned with the study of Marxism". During the summer of 1954, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard McGeorge Bundy, who served as a national security adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, threatened to withdraw Bellah's graduate student fellowship if he did not provide the names of his former club associates. Bellah was interrogated by the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the same purpose; as a result and his family spent two years in Canada, where he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute in McGill University in Montreal. He returned to Harvard after McCarthyism declined due to the death of its main instigator senator Joseph McCarthy.
Bellah afterwards wrote... I know from personal experience that Harvard did some wrong things during the McCarthy period and that those things have never been publicly acknowledged. At its worst it came close to psychological terror against defenseless individuals.... The university and the secret police were in collusion to suppress political dissent and to persecute dissenters who had changed their minds if they were not willing to become part of the persecution. Bellah's magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution, traces the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two; the sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote of the work: "This great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project... In this field I do not know of an ambitious and comprehensive study." The book won the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Religion.
Bellah is best-known for his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, which discusses how religion contributes to and detracts from America's common good, for his studies of religious and moral issues and their connection to society. Bellah was best known for his work related to American civil religion, a term which he coined in a 1967 article that has since gained widespread attention among scholars, he served in various positions at Harvard from 1955 to 1967 when he took the position of Ford Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the remainder of his career at Berkeley, his views are classified as communitarian. An academic biography of Robert Bellah, "the world's most read sociologist of religion", is under way. Bellah was born in Altus, Oklahoma, on February 23, 1927, his father died when he was two years old. His mother Lillian moved the family to Los Angeles. Bellah grew up in Los Angeles and attended Los Angeles High School, where he and his future wife, Melanie Hyman, were editors of the student newspaper.
They got married in 1948 after she graduated from Stanford University, he began studying at Harvard University after a service in the US Army. Bellah's wife died in 2010. Bellah was a communist during his student years at Harvard, as he recalled in 1977 in a letter to the New York Review of Books regarding McCarthyism at the university: Harvard's capitulation to McCarthyism is still being defended as a form of resistance to McCarthyism. An account of my experiences will, I believe, support Diamond's and not Bundy's interpretation of those years. I was a member of the Communist Party as a Harvard undergraduate from 1947 to 1949. During that period I was involved in the John Reed Club, a recognized student organization concerned with the study of Marxism. In that connection I might recount an incident that indicates that a difference between a public policy and a private policy at Harvard such as Diamond has suggested may have begun in 1949. According to Lipset: In 1949, the John Reed Club sponsored a talk by a well-known Communist, Gerhart Eisler, on his way to a job in East Germany after having been convicted for contempt of Congress.
When the University was attacked for allowing students to be corrupted, Wilbur Bender Dean of Harvard College, defended the students' right to hear, stating: "If Harvard students can be corrupted by an Eisler, Harvard College had better shut down as an educational institution... " I was, I believe
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts, 9 miles west of Boston. Founded in 1948 as a non-sectarian, coeducational institution sponsored by the Jewish community, Brandeis was established on the site of the former Middlesex University; the university is named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice of the U. S Supreme Court. In 2017, it had a total enrollment of 5,722 students on its suburban campus spanning over 235 acres; the institution offers more than 43 majors and 46 minors, two thirds of the undergraduate classes have 20 students or fewer. It is a member of Association of American Universities since 1985 and the Boston Consortium which allows students to cross-register to attend courses at other institutions including Boston College, Boston University and Tufts University; the university has a strong liberal arts focus, is known to attract a geographically and economically diverse student body, with 72% of its non-international undergraduates being out state, 50% of full-time undergraduates receiving need-based financial aid, 13.5% being recipients of the federal Pell Grant, having the 8th largest international student population of any university in the United States.
Brandeis was tied for 28th among all private national universities, 35th among all colleges and universities in the United States, 29th in "best value" schools in the U. S. News & World Report rankings. In 2018, Niche recognized Brandeis as the 9th most diverse college or university in the country, based on socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of students and professors; the university is highly regarded for its social sciences and government programs, with the Heller School, ranked as one of the top 10 policy schools in the United States. Alumni and affiliates include Albert Einstein and former First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nobel Prize laureate Roderick MacKinnon, as well as foreign heads of state, congressmen and diplomats, recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award, Emmy Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, as well as many other awards. Middlesex University was a medical school located in Waltham, at the time the only medical school in the United States that did not impose a quota on Jews.
The founder, Dr. John Hall Smith, died in 1944. Smith's will stipulated that the school should go to any group willing to use it to establish a non-sectarian university. Within two years, Middlesex University was on the brink of financial collapse; the school had not been able to secure accreditation by the American Medical Association, which Smith attributed to institutional antisemitism in the American Medical Association, and, as a result, Massachusetts had all but shut it down. Dr. Smith's son, C. Ruggles Smith, was desperate for a way to save something of Middlesex University, he learned of a New York committee headed by Dr. Israel Goldstein, seeking a campus to establish a Jewish-sponsored secular university. Smith approached Goldstein with a proposal to give the Middlesex campus and charter to Goldstein's committee, in the hope that his committee might "possess the apparent ability to reestablish the School of Medicine on an approved basis." While Goldstein was concerned about being saddled with a failing medical school, he was excited about the opportunity to secure a 100-acre "campus not far from New York, the premier Jewish community in the world, only 9 miles from Boston, one of the important Jewish population centers."
Goldstein agreed to accept Smith's offer, proceeding to recruit George Alpert, a Boston lawyer with fundraising experience as national vice president of the United Jewish Appeal. Alpert had worked his way through Boston University School of Law and co-founded the firm of Alpert and Alpert. Alpert's firm had a long association with the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, of which he was to become president from 1956 to 1961 He is best known today as the father of Richard Alpert, he was influential in Boston's Jewish community. His Judaism "tended to be social rather than spiritual." He was involved in assisting children displaced from Germany. Alpert was to be chairman of Brandeis from 1946 to 1954, a trustee from 1946 until his death. By February 5, 1946, Goldstein had recruited Albert Einstein, whose involvement drew national attention to the nascent university. Einstein believed the university would attract the best young people in all fields, satisfying a real need. In March 1946, Goldstein said the foundation had raised ten million dollars that it would use to open the school by the following year.
The foundation purchased Middlesex University's land and buildings for two million dollars. The charter of this operation was transferred to the Foundation along with the campus; the founding organization was announced in August and named The Albert Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning, Inc. The new school would be a Jewish-sponsored secular university open to students and faculty of all races and religions; the trustees offered to name the university after Einstein in the summer of 1946, but Einstein declined, on July 16, 1946, the board decided the university would be named after Louis Brandeis. Einstein objected to what he thought was excessively expansive promotion, to Goldstein's sounding out Abram L. Sachar as a possible president without consulting Einstein. Einstein took great offense at Goldstein's having invited Cardinal Francis Spellman to participate in a fundraising event. Einstein became alarmed by press announcements that exaggerated the school's success at fundraising. Einstein threatened to sever ties with the foundation on September 2, 1946.
Believing the venture could not succeed without Einstein, Goldstein agreed
Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic and public intellectual. The son of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness". A radical democrat and democratic socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters and Democracy Matters. West is an outspoken voice in left-wing politics in the United States, as such has been critical of members of the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, he has held professorships at Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Pepperdine University, Union Theological Seminary, the University of Paris during his career. He is a frequent commentator on politics and social issues in many media outlets. From 2010 through 2013, West co-hosted a radio program with Tavis Smiley, called West.
He has been featured in several documentaries, made appearances in Hollywood films such as The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, providing commentary for both films. West has made several spoken word and hip hop albums, due to his work, has been named MTV's Artist of the Week, he has been portrayed on Saturday Night Live by Kenan Thompson. West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa and grew up in Sacramento, where he graduated from John F. Kennedy High School, his mother, was a teacher and principal, his father, Clifton Louis West Jr. was a general contractor for the Defense Department. Irene B. West Elementary School in Elk Grove, California, is named for his mother; as a young man, West marched in civil rights demonstrations and organized protests demanding black studies courses at his high school, where he was class president. He wrote that, in his youth, he admired "the sincere black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party, the livid black theology of James H. Cone."In 1970, after graduating from high school, he enrolled at Harvard College and took classes from the philosophers Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell.
In 1973, West graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in civilization. He credits Harvard with exposing him to a broader range of ideas, influenced by his professors as well as the Black Panther Party. West says his Christianity prevented him from joining the BPP, instead choosing to work in local breakfast and church programs. After completing his undergraduate work at Harvard, West enrolled at Princeton University where he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1980, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a PhD degree in philosophy. At Princeton, West was influenced by Richard Rorty's neopragmatism. Rorty remained a close colleague of West's for many years following West's graduation; the title of West's dissertation was Ethics and the Marxist Tradition, revised and published under the title The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. In his late-20s, he returned to Harvard as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow before becoming an assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.
In 1984, he went to Yale Divinity School in what became a joint appointment in American studies. While at Yale, he participated in campus protests for a clerical labor union and divestment from apartheid South Africa. One of the protests resulted in his being jailed; as punishment, the university administration canceled his leave for the spring term in 1987, leading him to commute from Yale in New Haven, where he was teaching two classes, across the Atlantic Ocean to the University of Paris. He returned to Union Theological Seminary for one year before going to Princeton to become a professor of religion and director of the Program in African-American Studies from 1988 to 1994. After Princeton, he accepted an appointment as professor of African-American studies at Harvard University, with a joint appointment at the Harvard Divinity School. West taught one of the university's most popular courses, an introductory class on African-American studies. In 1998, he was appointed the first Alphonse Fletcher University Professor.
West utilized this new position to teach in not only African-American studies, but in divinity and philosophy. West left Harvard after a publicized dispute with then-President Lawrence Summers in 2002; that year, West returned to Princeton, where he helped create "one of the world’s leading centers for African-American studies" according to Shirley Tilghman, Princeton's president in 2011. In 2012, West left Princeton and returned to the institution where he began his teaching career, Union Theological Seminary, his departure from Princeton, unlike his departure from Harvard, was quite amicable. As of 2017, he continues to teach occasional courses at Princeton in an emeritus capacity as the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies; the recipient of more than 20 honorary degrees and an American Book Award, he has written or contributed to over twenty published books. West is a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America, for which he now serves as an honorary chair.
He is a co-founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. West is on the advisory board of the International Bridges to Justice. In 2008, he received a special recognition from the World Cultural Council. West is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and its World Policy Council, a think tank whose purpose is to expa
Just and Unjust Wars
Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations is a 1977 book by the philosopher Michael Walzer. Published by Basic Books, it is still in print, now as part of the Basic Books Classics Series. A second edition was published in 1992, a third edition in 2000, a fourth edition in 2006, a fifth edition in 2015; the book resulted from Walzer's reflections on the Vietnam War. Walzer draws on medieval Just War theory to explore the reasons that can justify war jus ad bellum and the ethical limits on the conduct of war jus in bello in an attempt to work out a modern, secular theory of just war. Just and Unjust Wars has, together with Spheres of Justice and Interpretation and Social Criticism, been identified as one of Walzer's most important works by the philosopher Will Kymlicka in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy; the work is considered a standard in the philosophical literature on the ethics of warfare, with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calling Just and Unjust Wars "the major contemporary statement of just war theory."
Interpretation and Social Criticism
Interpretation and Social Criticism is a 1987 book about political philosophy by Michael Walzer. Interpretation and Social Criticism has, together with Just and Unjust Wars and Spheres of Justice, been identified as one of Walzer's most important works by the philosopher Will Kymlicka. Books
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a collegiate public research university in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Founded in 1209 and granted a Royal Charter by King Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's fourth-oldest surviving university; the university grew out of an association of scholars who left the University of Oxford after a dispute with the townspeople. The two'ancient universities' share many common features and are referred to jointly as'Oxbridge'; the history and influence of the University of Cambridge has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Cambridge is formed from a variety of institutions which include 31 constituent Colleges and over 100 academic departments organised into six schools. Cambridge University Press, a department of the university, is the world's oldest publishing house and the second-largest university press in the world; the university operates eight cultural and scientific museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a botanic garden.
Cambridge's libraries hold a total of around 15 million books, eight million of which are in Cambridge University Library, a legal deposit library. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2018, the university had a total income of £1.965 billion, of which £515.5 million was from research grants and contracts. In the financial year ending 2017, the central university and colleges had combined net assets of around £11.8 billion, the largest of any university in the country. However, the true extent of Cambridge's wealth is much higher as many colleges hold their historic main sites, which date as far back as the 13th century, at depreceated valuations. Furthermore, many of the wealthiest colleges do not account for “heritage assets” such as works of art, libraries or artefacts, whose value many college accounts describe as “immaterial”; the university is linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster known as'Silicon Fen'. It is a member of numerous associations and forms part of the'golden triangle' of English universities and Cambridge University Health Partners, an academic health science centre.
As of 2018, Cambridge is the top-ranked university in the United Kingdom according to all major league tables. As of September 2017, Cambridge is ranked the world's second best university by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, is ranked 3rd worldwide by Academic Ranking of World Universities, 6th by QS, 7th by US News. According to the Times Higher Education ranking, no other institution in the world ranks in the top 10 for as many subjects; the university has educated many notable alumni, including eminent mathematicians, politicians, philosophers, writers and foreign Heads of State. As of March 2019, 118 Nobel Laureates, 11 Fields Medalists, 7 Turing Award winners and 15 British Prime Ministers have been affiliated with Cambridge as students, faculty or research staff. By the late 12th century, the Cambridge area had a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation, due to monks from the nearby bishopric church of Ely. However, it was an incident at Oxford, most to have led to the establishment of the university: two Oxford scholars were hanged by the town authorities for the death of a woman, without consulting the ecclesiastical authorities, who would take precedence in such a case, but were at that time in conflict with King John.
The University of Oxford went into suspension in protest, most scholars moved to cities such as Paris and Cambridge. After the University of Oxford reformed several years enough scholars remained in Cambridge to form the nucleus of the new university. In order to claim precedence, it is common for Cambridge to trace its founding to the 1231 charter from King Henry III granting it the right to discipline its own members and an exemption from some taxes. A bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach "everywhere in Christendom". After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter from Pope Nicholas IV in 1290, confirmed as such in a bull by Pope John XXII in 1318, it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to visit Cambridge to study or to give lecture courses; the colleges at the University of Cambridge were an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself; the colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars.
There were institutions without endowments, called hostels. The hostels were absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some traces, such as the name of Garret Hostel Lane. Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse, Cambridge's first college, in 1284. Many colleges were founded during the 14th and 15th centuries, but colleges continued to be established until modern times, although there was a gap of 204 years between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and that of Downing in 1800; the most established college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s. However, Homerton College only achieved full university college status in March 2010, making it the newest full college. In medieval times, many colleges were founded so that their members would pray for the souls of the founders, were associated with chapels or abbeys; the colleges' focus changed in 1536 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. King Henry VIII ordered the university to disband its Faculty of Canon Law and to stop teaching "scholastic philosophy".
In response, colleges changed
