Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
Republican and Galilean
By Bernard Williams
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
by Charles Taylor
Harvard University Press, 601 pp., $37.50
Charles Taylor is concerned with the ways in which we can and should think of ourselves as people who have—or lack—a sense of what is important to us, of what we most care about, and of what is valuable. This sense of our moral identity, for most of us, is not fully explicit, and does not consist of a set of formulated beliefs. It may look sometimes as though our sense of what is valuable is described by a set of beliefs, when a system of moral philosophy or a political creed seems to sum up our outlook; but as Taylor brilliantly shows in several different connections, it is typical of such formulations that they fail to explain their own appeal.
Review, 4768 words
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