In my paper, I set The Language Animal against a broader picture of Charles Taylor’s intellectual trajectory. Sources of the Self (1989) left open three major questions: (a) the viability of religious moral sources in a ‘secular’ age; (b) the compatibility between a robust moral realism and a genealogical account of modern identity; and (c) the meaning and destiny of the so-called ‘linguistic turn.’ This is the framing topic of his last book. Although Taylor’s variety of hermeneutics is unquestionably a product of the linguistic turn, he has operated with a broad notion of the linguistic capacity from the start. Language is, for him, a shared activity and the acknowledgment of its animal embeddedness functions in his work as an antidote against any too idealized a view of the kind of creatures that humans are. In his earlier writings, however, a structural tension lurked below the surface between a Gadamerian notion of Sprache and a more phenomenological, Merleau-Pontyan, embodied outlook that was less modelled on articulate speech. My claim is that his new book marks a shift from a more speech-oriented to a more body-oriented understanding of language.

Human beings shape the landscapes of their individual, social, and political lives entangled in a web of language. Everything that human beings do, the way they act and think, is shaped by the use of language. Charles Taylor explores these anthropological dimensions of language. This article discusses three different aspects of Taylor’s language-oriented anthropology and confronts his considerations with three distinct questions concerning the relation between language and the lives of human beings. The first question is how Taylor’s constitutive view of language can be related to his criticism of the mediational view of language. Next, the relation between language and concepts is discussed. Finally, emotions are considered.

In my paper, I shall briefly explore a philosophy of performative speech acts, which is in line with Charles Taylor’s investigation into the human linguistic capacity. It complements the full shape of the linguistic capacity and gives an account of how reason enters thinking due to language. Language creates openness to reasons by, as I emphasize, means of a critique of self-deception, which could be accomplished by linguistic capacity.

In some strains of current philosophy, there is a growing interest in the passive and receptive aspects of the human condition. This interest is often paired with a criticism that ‘Western’ philosophy unduly neglects those aspects because of an ‘agential bias.’ This criticism has also been directed against the philosophy of Charles Taylor. I try to show that this criticism has some force in principle but is not plausible in the case of Taylor. First, I analyse John Rawls’ hugely influential concept of a life plan and show how this ‘agential bias’ applies here. Second, I argue that such a bias does not apply to Taylor’s The Language Animal by showing how active and passive moments are interwoven in his concepts of articulation and narration.

In The Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s struggle to provide a theoretical framework for his narration of the self finally becomes obvious. About 30 years after he wrote his great and fascinating Sources of the Self, Taylor closes the gap between the self as a radical being-in-the-world and its analytical premises. Even if the main topic of Taylor’s new book may seem to be only a comparison of what he calls ‘HHH-theory’ and ‘HLC-theory,’ there are two other authors, the combination of whose ideas clarifies not only his approach to language but also to his concept of ‘reality’ as such: Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This paper focuses on the process of language acquisition in childhood. Departing from accounts—such as that of Jean Piaget, which considers cognitive development as the main condition of language acquisition—Taylor shows how deeply our linguistic capacity is rooted in a prior socio-affective realm of social spaces or communion. Beyond Taylor, the question arises as to whether one can identify different normative consequences for pedagogical practices, as well as for the status of childhood in social theory. The implications of Taylor’s language theory for the relation between human and world will be suggested by connecting the intrinsic dimensions of linguistic communication to the theory of resonance.

One of the features of an encompassing account of language that Charles Taylor examines in Chapter Five, “The Figuring Dimension of Language,” of The Language Animal is a special kind of metaphor, which is rooted in the embodiment of humans. Their perspective-taking, their intuition of position in space, etc., provide ‘structural templates’ for thinking and leave their traces in their expressions. Taylor compares these metaphors with paradigms. My paper discusses the differences between the two. Taylor’s example ‘Time Is a Resource’ is understood more deeply if seen as a paradigm, i.e., a set of beliefs and practices, instead of as a ‘structural template,’ i.e., rooted in embodiment.

Does the creative force of discourse Taylor describes enable the subaltern to speak for themselves? To answer this question, I underlay Jacques Rancière’s concept of politics. I correlate Charles Taylor’s opposition of HLC- and HHH-language theories to Rancière’s distinction of ‘politics’ and ‘police.’ However, since the creative force of discourse also re-enacts human order through rituals and repetitions, it is not political per se. I discuss Taylor’s example of the “avuncular” relationship to show at which point the creative force could turn into a fundament of politics and where it doesn’t.

In Chapter 8 of The Language Animal, Charles Taylor claims that narratives are unsubstitutable for an appropriate understanding of social life and ‘human affairs’ in general. In order to identify open questions in his argumentation as well as unwanted consequences of his outlook, I proceed in three consecutive steps. I first problematize Taylor’s distinction between laws and stories, then go on to address his intentional blurring of stories and histories, and finally suggest that the concept of genealogy might be a promising candidate for describing Taylor’s approach, concluding that he implicitly forms the equation: narrative equals history equals critique.

All perdurantists claim that objects persist by having different temporal parts at different moments of their existence. Nevertheless, while most of them argue that temporal parts are individuated by their temporal boundaries, a minority claim that they are individuated by a principle of unity. After a critical review of these two options, I will argue in favour of a new version of the second one, by showing that it provides a better defence of perdurantism against other conceptions of persistence.

In Plato’s Laches, Socrates ascribes knowledge of courage to his eponymous interlocutor and makes an attempt to reconstruct it in speech. His attribution of knowledge to Laches controls his discursive behaviour in the dialogue, requiring him to withhold judgements of error, construe apparent error as a failure of speech rather than knowledge, and search for the deeper truth underlying the overt content of Laches’ utterances. Socrates’ method in this elenchus can be described as a kind of ‘epistemic exegesis,’ which aims to draw out and give discursive shape to knowledge of virtue that it assumes that the interlocutor already possesses.