Phenomenology and Overlapping Consensus

Abstract

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher best known for his contributions in the areas of political philosophy, philosophy of social science, and history of Western Modernity. Taylor has, due to his willingness to account for dimensions of human experience beyond natural science, along with his emphasis on how ideas shape history, and thus that history and philosophy are deeply intertwined, been linked to the philosophical tradition of Idealism.¹ However, in his attempt to account for the historical developments of concepts and notions such as “the self” or “secularity,” Taylor seeks to balance between what he refers to as a “vulgar Marxist” materialism, that focuses solely on structural and material explanations and which tends to “bypass human motivations all together,” and on the other hand, a “vulgar Hegelian” view, in which ideas are seen as sufficient to explain the cases behind historical developments.² Rejecting these two extremes, Taylor seeks to account for how ideas are “embedded in practices.”³ Taylor here includes practices at all levels of human social life, such as family, village, national politics, rituals of religious communities, and argues that “ideas articulate practices as patterns of dos and don’ts.”⁴