Charles Taylor: "The Language Animal" – Institute for Social Justice

In The Language Animal, Professor Charles Taylor shows that the accounts of the nature of language that have dominated analytic philosophy in recent decades are much too narrow, focusing on the function language plays in encoding information, at the expense of the constitutive powers of language. In this lecture, Professor Taylor refocuses attention on the creative, meaning-making, and meaning-articulating powers of language. Professor Taylor is one of the most important thinkers of the last half-century and is the recipient of the Berggruen Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Kyoto Prize, and the John W. Kluge Prize (the Nobel Prize for scholars in the humanities and the social sciences). A philosopher and public intellectual of enormous range and depth, Taylor has achieved a very large and diverse readership through the huge impact of such books as Sources of the Self (1989), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1994), and his magnum opus, A Secular Age (2007), hailed by the New York Times as “a work of stupendous breath and erudition.” The Language Animal is published by Harvard University Press: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.ph... Recorded at the Institute for Social Justice on 22 April 2016, ACU North Sydney (Cameraygal Country). http://isj.acu.edu.au/ Video by Chris Wiseman and Simon Dougherty.