The Epistemological Picture, Engaged Agency, and the Background Sample Clauses

The Epistemological Picture, Engaged Agency, and the Background. While Taylor’s early writings up through Sources of the Self portray a reductionistic breed of “naturalism” as the primary culprit in modernity’s self-misunderstanding, Taylor’s work collected in Philosophical Arguments up through the publication of A Secular Age begins to shift focus towards another source of modernity’s woes. Taylor calls this intellectual block, perhaps confusingly, “epistemology” or more recently, “the epistemological picture.”312 This source of modernity’s disquiet counts as a second important foil against which the concept of articulation is itself articulated. In this chapter I want to show how this strand of Taylor’s thought plays a crucial role in supplying ‘articulation’ with content. What does Taylor mean when he criticizes the “epistemological picture” at work in modern philosophy? Extending far beyond the technical sub-field concerned with barn facades and thermometer-enhanced brains, “the epistemological picture” refers to a pervasive set of unspoken 312 See respectively, Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), 1-19; Charles Taylor, “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), 26-49; Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Modern Epistemology,” in Faithful Reading: New Essays in Theology and Philosophy in Honour of Fergus Kerr (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 43-60. For an excellent discussion of Taylor’s critique of “epistemology,” especially with regard to Taylor’s position vis-à-vis Richard Rorty’s anti-realism see Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Taylor’s (Anti-) Epistemology,” in Charles Taylor, ed. Ruth Abbey (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), 52-83. Also see Charles Taylor, “Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein,” in Philosophical Arguments (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995) chapter 4; Charles Taylor, “Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993), 317-336. assumptions governing how we moderns think about our relation to the world around us, other people, and ourselves. Taylor’s description of epistemology as a “picture” is significant. By calling it a “picture,” he draws our attention to the way certain philosophical assumptions have worked their way into our lived experience of the world. Epistemology thus functions primarily as what he calls “a structur...