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The whole of Taylor's work turns on a single question: how did modern human beings come to experience themselves as an 'I'? His answer marks the limits of individualism without denying freedom, and treats secularity not as the death of belief but as its becoming one option among others.
Charles Taylor
Christian Tornau, a Latinist at Würzburg, has identified two previously unknown sermons by Augustine in a monastic manuscript held in Poland. Their subject is the Witch of Endor summoning a dead prophet — which is to say, the question of whether God is omnipotent. The sermons give no answer; they leave the congregation to think.
The 5th World Congress on Logic and Religion meets in Vancouver from 23 to 27 September. Alongside the classical debates in theology, the programme sets artificial intelligence, epistemic coherence and traditions from Jainism to China. One question runs through all of it: under what conditions can a person believe rationally?
Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, brings his new film 'The Basics of Philosophy' to the 83rd Venice Film Festival, where it screens out of competition. Martin Scorsese is among the producers. The title invites a question: why would a box-office director take philosophy as his subject?
More than a hundred books, running from hedonism to atheism and from readings of Nietzsche to political polemic. Onfray has now begun a four-volume series that sets out to rewrite the history of Western thought. What makes him contentious is not only what he argues but where he chooses to argue it.
Cast out of his congregation at twenty-three under the heaviest curse its elders could pronounce, he ground lenses for a living and left his masterwork unpublished. But Spinoza's real radicalism was never his atheism: he did not deny God, he stripped God of personhood.
He was a professor at twenty-three, was overshadowed by Hegel, and was then forgotten. Yet over the past thirty years Schelling's philosophy of nature and his essay on freedom have been read again. The reason is simple: his was the first great attempt to think the human being without placing it outside nature.
John Locke was born at Wrington on 29 August 1632. A theory of knowledge that made the mind a blank sheet, a political philosophy that tied property to labour and a defence of toleration place him among the founding writers of the modern world.
Entries for the Berggruen Institute's 100,000-dollar essay competition closed on 17 August. This year's subject is Karl Jaspers's notion of the Axial Age: is humanity once again on the hinge of history? For the first time the competition also accepted works of fiction.
