Professor Charles Taylor, “Is Democracy in danger?”
At University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, November, 2012 In a public lecture entitled Is Democracy in danger?, eminent Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor spoke of democracy as amongst the key civilizational human accomplishments yet one that is also recurrently remade and refashioned across the ages. While we have codified and embedded it into our constitutional, legal and cultural practices in Canada, Professor Taylor spoke of the contemporary sense we still feel of falling back on its ideals. For Professor Taylor, democratic societies require not only shared and acceptable procedures to… Read More
Prizes & Honors in Philosophy: Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada
Click here for the official website of the RSC. In this fifth feature of our #prizes in philosophy series, we take a look at the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada — an honor granted by the Royal Society of Canada, on an annual basis, for their “remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life”. Created in 1882 by Canada’s Governor General Marquis of Lorne and incorporated in 1883 by a statute of the Parliament of Canada, over 3700 scholars have since… Read More
Professor Ronald Beiner on “Taylor, Rawls and Secularism”
Religion and Modernity, McGill University, 2012 Click here for the video. In the 2012 conference Religion and Modernity, Philosopher Ronald Beiner spoke about religion and its tension within Western liberal secular societies: while liberal societies in the West provide a “breathing space vis-a-vis religion” to ensure the public agenda is not “subject to dictation by religious authorities” but the deliberation of “citizen to citizen”, the problem however is to explain why it is illegitimate for religious expressions to have “leverage” on “power and authority”. There is a paradox, contends Professor Beiner, for… Read More
Professor Charles Taylor and Rev. Robert P. Imbelli: A conversation with Charles Taylor
Boston College, 2011 Click here for the video. In the following interview, Philosopher Charles Taylor discusses the insights that can be gained by understanding the historical and cultural frameworks of Western secular modernity as contexts in which discussions or the content of religion have not only in some sense occurred, been inherited and must now occur and be justified in new settings but also distinguishes it as one kind of modernity amongst many other emerging modernities in the world. When thinking about the role of Christian thought in the North-American and European… Read More
Eminent #PhilosophyLectures Series: Gifford Lectures Series
Click here for the official website. In the following series, we look at renowned #PhilosophyLectures that bring together a variety of interdisciplinary intellectual disciplines. Our first eminent lecture in this series is the Gifford Lectures series — considered the foremost lecture series in integrating diverse religious, scientific and philosophical perspectives. An appointment as a Gifford Lecturer is considered in Scottish academia as “one of the most prestigious honors”. For well over a hundred years, the distinguished lecture series has celebrated the world’s most renowned living thinkers in exploring the full scope of… Read More
