Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

The Quality of Life

Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen

Print publication date: 1993

Print ISBN-13: 9780198287971
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003
DOI: 10.1093/0198287976.001.0001

Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical

Reason
Martha Nussbaum (Contributor Webpage)

DOI:10.1093/0198287976.003.0018

Abstract and Keywords

Nussbaum agrees with Taylor's argument and explicates the significance of
Taylor's work for the concerns and projects of development studies. She then
adds two points to Taylor's analysis: one about the history of science and Taylor's
historiography, which Nussbaum finds presented in a manner that seems simpler
and more monolithic than it actually is; the other on moral psychology, where
Nussbaum suggests that Taylor's account of reason needs to be supplemented
with a picture of the connection between argument and motivation, and between
reason and passion.

Keywords:   historiography, history of science, moral psychology, motivation, passion, practical reason

[1]
Charles Taylor's argument is, I believe, both convincing and important. And it is
especially important for this project, since it shows an illuminating way of
looking at the difficult evaluative disputes we encounter in thinking about the
development of societies that are both different from one another and also (in
most cases) internally heterogeneous. Development is itself an evaluative
concept: it implies a progression from one situation to another that is (allegedly)
in some ways better or more complete. Sometimes this issue of evaluation is
ignored. Sometimes policy‐makers and social scientists proceed as if it were
perfectly clear to everyone what the values involved in development are–or even
as if there were no evaluative question involved at all, but only certain facts
which are alleged to be measurable independently of evaluation. Several of the

Page 1 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

papers in this volume, notably Hilary Putnam's, but also, in a very different way,
Robert Erikson's, convincingly show the incoherence and barrenness of that way
of thinking.1

But if we do accept the fact that we are grappling with a difficult evaluative
question here, we then need to know how to reflect about such questions. We
need to have a clear conception of what it is to ask and answer them, how to
argue about them where there is disagreement, and what sort and degree of
success to expect from reason and rational argument. Providing a powerful
account of rational ethical argument seems to me to be one of the central
challenges for a practical philosophy, a philosophy that will really help people to
make progress on troublesome human problems. The need for such an account
in connection with development problems was certainly one of the primary
motivations for bringing philosophers together with economists and other social
scientists in this project. And Taylor's account seems to me among the most
powerful of those currently before us in philosophy, so his participation in the
project is especially valuable. I do not find much to criticize in the paper: I am in
sympathy with most of what Taylor says. So in commenting I want simply, first,
to say a little more about why I think Taylor's work in general, and this paper in
particular, is significant for the concerns and projects of development studies.
Then I shall briefly add two points to Taylor's analysis: one about the history of
science, one about moral psychology.

(p.233) [2]
A person who studies the history of philosophical approaches to the social
sciences over the past several decades in search of a model for the analysis of
development would be likely to conclude that she is faced with just two
alternatives, each in its own way unpalatable. On the one hand, she would find
an approach that conceives of social science as a kind of natural science,2 and of
the reasoned understanding of human beings that is the goal of social science as
an understanding detached from the commitments and self‐understandings that
are characteristic of human beings in their daily lives. Such approaches usually
involve some sort of reduction of qualitative distinctions to quantitative
distinctions; and they attach a great deal of importance to the simplified
mathematical representation of complex human matters. This approach, which
has had enormous influence in shaping economic approaches to development,
seems to have the advantage of promising truly rational solutions to difficult
problems of choice. But it may, in the end, seem unacceptable because of the
way in which it obscures or denies the richness and plurality of human values
and commitments (both across societies and within each single society), and
because of its reductive understanding of what human beings and communities
are.

Page 2 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

On the other hand, she would find a reaction against this approach, a reaction
by now itself well entrenched in the social sciences. The alternative approach
insists on restoring human self‐interpretations to the sphere of social analysis in
all their richness and variety. But its proponents frequently give up on practical
reason, holding that there is no way in which reason can really resolve
evaluative disputes. It is held that once we understand that the points of view of
the participants in the dispute, to be correctly represented, must be represented
from within the participants' own perspectives on the world, and once we
understand, in addition, that cultural value schemes are highly various and
largely incommensurable with one another, we will realize that practical reason
has no effective part to play in such disputes. If it tries to take up a position of
neutrality, detaching itself from all the competing conceptions, it will be unable
to do so coherently, since no such external standpoint is available. If, on the
other hand, it remains within the perspective of one of the parties, it seems that
it must prove unfair and insensitive to the concerns of the other party, and be,
really, nothing more than an attempt to dominate the other party. At the bottom
of all so‐called reasoning, then, is nothing but power. The work of Michel
Foucault is frequently invoked in defence of this pattern of reasoning–although I
believe that this is in some ways a misleading oversimplification of Foucault's
contribution.3

This alternative approach has been highly influential, especially in anthropology,

(p.234) literary theory, and discussions of legal interpretation. It has an
obvious appeal, where development studies are concerned, since it restores to
the field of analysis so much of human life that the other approach omits.4 And
yet it may well seem in the end as unpalatable as the other, since it tells us that
we cannot succeed in establishing by practical reasoning any conclusions critical
of things we might like to criticize in societies whose traditions we are
examining. To use Taylor's example, it tells us that any attempt we might make
to criticize another society's treatment of women, or to hold that real
development for that society must include some changes in women's position, is
and can be nothing more than a kind of cultural imperialism.

For the past twenty‐five years, Charles Taylor has been developing a distinctive
position in this dispute, one that combines, I believe, the best features of the two
approaches, and also reinterprets their disagreement with one another in an
illuminating way.5 Beginning with The Explanation of Behaviour in 1964,6 Taylor
has consistently offered arguments of very high quality against a reductive
natural science approach to the study of human beings and human action,
insisting that any human science worthy of being taken seriously must include,
and indeed base itself upon, the sense of value and the commitments that human
beings actually display as they live and try to understand themselves. On the
other hand, he has also consistently argued, as he does here, that this does not
leave practical reason nowhere to go. In a series of papers on anthropological
understanding of different cultures, he has shown that it is possible to take very
Page 3 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

seriously the data of cultural anthropology and of history, and the differences
between conceptual schemes, and yet to hold that, in certain ways and under
certain circumstances, practical reason can legitimately criticize traditions.7 The
combination of anthropological sensitivity with philosophical precision in these
papers gives them a more or less unique place in the debate, and they are
certainly an invaluable guide to anyone working on development issues.8

The present paper is, I think, of special interest in Taylor's defence of practical
reason. According to Taylor's own account, in order to argue successfully against
an opponent he needs to be able, among other things, to give a plausible account
of the opponent's error. And in this paper he does just that. First, he argues
effectively against the opponent of practical reason, presenting forms of
unmistakably (p.235) rational argument that do not depend on the starting
points that this opponent has held, plausibly, to be unavailable. Then he goes on
to tell us where the opponent went wrong, and in a very interesting way. For the
error of the sceptical opponent of practical reason consists in remaining too
much in the grip of the very picture of rational argument that is allegedly being
criticized. While objecting to the hegemony of the natural sciences over the
human sciences, and while seeking to restore to the human sciences their own
rich humanistic character, the opponent has, presumably without full awareness,
imported into her analysis one very central part of the natural science model,
namely, its understanding of what constitutes a rational argument. For she
seems to assume that rational argument requires neutrality, and deduction from
premisses that are external to all historical perspectives. If this is not available,
then we can say goodbye to reason itself. It is only because of this residual
commitment to the rejected model, and her consequent neglect of other forms of
rational arguing, that the opponent has been able so quickly to conclude that,
the ethical domain being what it is, there are no good rational arguments to be
found in it.

This, I think, is a profound diagnosis. In various forms this problem is present in

many contemporary positions that end up embracing some form of subjectivism
or scepticism about practical reason: in Foucault's work, at least sometimes; in
the work of Jacques Derrida, who seems to argue that without unmediated
access to the world as it is in itself we have no arguments, nothing but the free
play of interpretations; in other ways, in the work of numerous others who have
influenced recent thinking in the human sciences.9 What Taylor does is, first of
all, to point out the opponent's reliance on a model of arguing drawn from
natural science; second, to argue from the history of science that this is not even
a very persuasive picture of the way scientific argument goes, especially in times
of scientific change; and, third, to offer several models of reasoning that both
explain the recalcitrant scientific cases and offer examples of ethical rationality.
Like Hilary Putnam, Taylor shows that a really good account of science and
scientific progress will not yield as hard a distinction between the scientific and
the ethical as has been defended by some philosophers. And he shows that in
Page 4 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

both areas progress can be achieved by a complex and patient type of self‐
clarification, by patterns of argument in which implicit commitments are
brought to light. Such arguments might well be said to be as old as Socratic
cross‐examination, and to have as their goal something like the self‐
understanding sought by Socrates.10

Several morals for development studies might be drawn from this analysis. First,
that we ought to reject disengaged pseudoscientific understandings of the
human being, in favour of conceptions that give a larger role to people's own
commitments and self‐understandings. Second that when we do so we need not
and should not give up on rational argument. But we must not expect the
rational (p.236) arguments we use to be like those we associate with a certain
view of natural science. They are likely to be piecemeal rather than global; they
will be very much rooted in the particularities of people's historical situations;
and frequently, as Taylor has said, they will be biographical rather than abstract.
They will describe progress in a way that may seem to lack neatness and
simplicity. For they will be, as he says, inherently comparative in their
understandings of development, rather than absolute. And since they are
attempts to bring to light what is deep and incompletely perceived in the
thought of the person or group in question, they will be, frequently, both highly
concrete and somewhat indirect. They may, for example, tell stories, appeal to
the imagination and the emotions–tapping, through a very non‐scientific use of
language, people's intuitions about what matters most.11 All of this I find
exemplified in a striking way in Robert Erikson's account of a sociological
approach that is both humanistic and committed to practical reason; and I think
that Erikson should perhaps be less defensive than he is about the apparent
messiness and complexity of his descriptions. There is precision in the lucid
depiction of a highly complex and indeterminate situation; there is evasion and
vagueness in the simple schematic description of a multi‐faceted concrete case.

Finally, Taylor points out that the process of rational argument is frequently
associated with raising the level of discontent and unhappiness in the people
who are doing the arguing. People who, as a result of arguments such as those
he describes, become aware of the variety of human societies and lose the
isolation of what Taylor calls their ‘encapsulated’ condition frequently feel pain:
both the pain of a new dissatisfaction with current arrangements and the pain of
reflection itself. It seems to me that this is an important observation, and one
that arises in development in significant ways. If one is committed to measuring
development in terms of utility–construed either as happiness (pleasure) or as
the satisfaction of current desires and preferences–one will be bound to judge
that self‐understanding is inimical to development, in such cases. Taylor seems
to me to be right that self‐understanding has a value of its own, apart from any
utility (so construed) it brings. And his example of the changing position of
women shows us one case where the pain of discontent has had a definite

Page 5 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

positive link with development. This connection is also supported by Amartya

Sen's data on women's changing perceptions of their health situation.12

[3]
My one quarrel with the picture of scientific change presented by Taylor is that
the picture he opposes is actually much less plausible, even initially, than his (p.
237) account makes it seem. Taylor's final answer to the alleged conceptual
discontinuity between ancient Greek science and Galilean science is, I think, the
right one: that there were all along interests in practical control and being able
to lead a flourishing life that motivated all parties to the dispute, interests in
terms of which partisans of the new science could show its superiority, in a way
that the old‐time Aristotelian could not deny. My objection is only that the fact
that ancient science did have an interest in practical control is unmistakably
clear; the opponent's account of the alleged conceptual discontinuity has simply
obscured it by describing the ancient picture in too narrow and monolithic a
way.

In fact, if one looks not only at Plato, but also at the people who were actually
doing science in the ancient world–above all at the development of Greek
medicine–one finds ubiquitous reference to practical manipulation and control,
and one finds that this is one of the primary hallmarks of the scientific. Doctors
regularly defend their procedures on the grounds that they work, and oppose
rival medical procedures on the grounds that they are too abstract and
schematic to be useful.13 Even mathematics is repeatedly presented as a
discipline whose primary point and motivation is its practical usefulness, in
measuring and navigation and so forth. Prometheus, in Aeschylus' Prometheus
Bound, calls it ‘chief of all the clever stratagems’.14 Even if the later
Aristotelians of Taylor's story played down this aspect of science, they could
hardly have been ignorant of it, since Aristotle himself gives it prominence.15 So
it seems to me that the opponent's story does not really get off the ground; the
alleged rupture is just bad history.

Why is this worth mentioning here? It is worth mentioning because so much of

the historiography on which contemporary debates about conceptual
discontinuity are based is bad in exactly this way. So many alleged
discontinuities look like discontinuities because the historian in question has
made a highly selective use of texts, or has stuck to theoretical work, neglecting
the history of popular thought. Much of Foucault's work is flawed in this way,16
although I still believe it to be important work. My experience is that if one
studies any single society in sufficient depth one finds in it a rich plurality of
views and conceptions, frequently in active debate with one another; and
frequently these debates themselves are very important in explaining such large‐
scale conceptual shifts as do take place. This is essential to any good history of
the later reception of ancient Greek ideas. Amartya Sen and I have argued that it
is also essential to good work on India, where the existence of debate and

Page 6 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

internal criticism needs emphasis.17 If I have any slight criticism of Taylor's

historiography in several of his papers, (p.238) it is that things sometimes look
simpler and more monolithic than in fact they were. Appreciating their
complexity gives us new ways of understanding how practical reason can
function in social argument, and reinforces the general picture Taylor presents
here.18

[4]
Now I want to make a point about psychology. Despair about the efficacy of
practical reason, in the recent philosophical literature, frequently takes a form
slightly different from the form that Taylor criticizes here (the form of despair
that seeks scientific neutrality, even while it holds it to be unavailable).
Frequently the problem of practical reason is put in terms of an alleged gap
between reason and motivation. The argument imagines some bad or immoral
person, and then says, ‘All right. Even supposing that we can show to our
satisfaction that this person is engaging in bad reasoning, even if we can
convince ourselves about her by an argument that moves us, isn't there
something troublesome about the fact that the argument doesn't do anything for
that person? Have we really given that person reasons for action, if they are not
reasons that have some force with that person, in the sense that they arouse
desires and emotions of the appropriate motivational type?’ The point is often
made by saying that the only reasons we should care about are ‘internal’
reasons, reasons that are (or could become) part of the system of desires and
motivations of the person involved. If that does not happen in our case, there is
something peculiar about calling these reasons for that person at all, or saying
that a rational argument has established something that this person ought to
believe or to do.19 But the question of what reasons can become ‘internal’ for a
person seems to depend very much on what desires and emotions that person
happens to have. And this seems to be something that rational argument can do
little or nothing about. Even if the argument should convince our person to
believe its conclusion (this argument says), it is hard to see how it could reform
her desires. But unless this happens, nothing much has been accomplished.

This is a deep and complex issue in philosophy, and, indeed, in life. I cannot even
fully state it here, much less resolve it, but what I want to suggest, as my second
friendly amendment to Taylor's account, is that I think he needs to supplement
his account of reason with a picture of the connection between argument and
motivation, between reason and passion. And I suspect that if one probes this
issue, one will find that the sceptic about reason is in the grip, here too, of a
picture of reason that is the outcome of a relatively recent naturalistic
understanding of the human being, a picture that could not withstand the
scrutiny of our deepest beliefs concerning who we are.

Page 7 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

(p.239) There has been a tendency in philosophy—ever since Descartes

analysed the passions in connection with his view of the mind–body split,
dissociating them strongly from beliefs—to think of passions as brute feelings,
more or less impervious to reasoning, coming from altogether different parts of
our nature. Most philosophers have long since given up the Cartesian picture of
the mind–body split; but many still retain the associated picture of emotions as
feelings that are distinct from and relatively impervious to reasoning. If one
looks back to the correspondence of Descartes with Princess Elizabeth, that very
astute and sceptical philosophical mind, one finds in her challenges (and in their
mutual references to Stoic ideas) an older and also, I believe, more adequate
view of the passions, one that was the dominant picture in the thought of most of
the ancient Greek philosophers, and one that was extremely important to their
picture of the ways in which philosophy can be practical, changing people and
societies for the better.

This picture (which one can find in different forms in Aristotle and in the
Epicureans, but above all in the Stoics) insists that emotions or passions20 are
highly discriminating evaluative responses, very closely connected to beliefs
about what is valuable and what is not. Grief, for example, is intimately linked to
the belief that some object or person, now lost, has profound importance; it is a
recognition of that importance. Anger involves and rests upon a belief that one
has been wronged in a more than trivial way. And so forth. What follows from
this view is that a rational argument can powerfully influence a person's
passions and motivations. If rational argument can show either that the
supposed bad event (the death or insult or whatever) did not take place, or that
the purported occasion for grief or anger is really not the sort of thing one ought
to care very much about, then one can actually change a person's psychology in
a more than intellectual way. The Stoics and Epicureans took on this task in
many ways, showing people, for example, that the worldly goods and goods of
reputation that are commonly the bases of anger should not be valued as people
value them. Such arguments do not just operate on the surface of the mind. They
conduct a searching scrutiny of the whole of the person's mental and emotional
life. And this is so because emotions are not just animal urges, but fully human
parts of our outlook on the world.21

On this basis the Hellenistic philosophers built up a powerful picture of a

practical philosophy, showing how good arguments about topics like death and
the reasons for anger could really change the heart, and, through that, people's
personal and social lives. They compared the philosopher to the doctor: through
reasoning he or she treats and heals the soul. It seems to me that such an
account of motivational change through argument would be an attractive and
important addition to Taylor's picture. I believe that an account like this can be
defended (p.240) today,22 and that the defence will make a powerful
contribution to the defence of practical reason.

Page 8 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

If Taylor chooses to develop his picture of practical reasoning along these lines,
he will need to move even further than he has already from the scientific model
of reasoning. For good ‘therapeutic’ argument may wish to make use of
techniques like story‐telling and vivid exemplification—techniques that lie far
indeed from the scientific model—in order to bring to light hidden judgements of
importance and to give a compelling picture of a life in which such judgements
are absent. All this would fit in well with Taylor's emphasis in his paper on the
‘biographical’ nature of argument, and its function of bringing hidden things to
light. Such further developments would yield arguments that could, I believe, be
defended as Taylor defends his examples here: as examples of rational argument
and epistemic progress.

Bibliography

Bibliography references:

Booth, W. (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.

Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press.

—— (1979). Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. B. Harlow. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

de Sousa, R. (1987). The Rationality of Emotions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive

Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

—— (1982). ‘Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in Law and Literature’,

Texas Law Review, 551.

—— (1985). ‘Anti‐Professionalism’, New Literary History, 17.

Foucault, M. (1984). The Use of Pleasure. History of Sexuality, ii, trans. R.

Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

Lutz, C. (1988). Unnatural Emotions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marglin, F.A., and Marglin, S. (1990). Dominating Knowledge: Development,

Culture, and Resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nussbaum, M. (1985). ‘Sophistry about Conventions: A Reply to Stanley Fish’,

New Literary History, 17. Reprinted in Nussbaum (1990).

Page 9 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

—— (1986). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1987). ‘The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions’, Apeiron, 20, 129–77.

(p.241) —— (1988). ‘Reading for Life’, a review of Booth (1988), Yale Journal of
Law and the Humanities, 1. Reprinted in Nussbaum (1990).

—— (1989a). ‘Beyond Obsession and Disgust: Lucretius' Genealogy of Love’,

Apeiron, 22, 1–59.

—— (1989b). ‘Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature’,

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, 305–51.

—— (1990). Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford and

New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press.

—— and Sen, A. (1989). ‘Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions’, in

M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.

Posner, R. A. (1988). Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

—— (1987). The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.

Rorty, A. (ed.) (1980). Explaining Emotions. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

—— (1988). Mind in Action. Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston: Beacon

Press.

Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

—— (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Sen, A. (1980). ‘Plural Utility’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 80.

—— (1985). Commodities and Capabilities. Amsterdam: North‐Holland.

—— (1987). The Standard of Living. Tanner Lectures on Human Values 1985, ed.
G. Hawthorn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Page 10 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

—— and Williams, B. (1987). Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Taylor, C. (1964). The Explanation of Behaviour. London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul.

—— (1985a). Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

—— (1985b). Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers II.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge,

Mass., and London: Harvard University Press.

Vlastos, G. (1983). ‘The Socratic Elenchus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient

Philosophy, i. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

White, J. B. (1989). ‘What Can a Lawyer Learn from Literature?’, Harvard Law
Review, 102, 2014–47.

Wiggins, D. (1987). Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value.

Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell.

Williams, B. (1973). ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. C. Smart and B. Williams,

Ultilitarianism For and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1981). ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck: Philosophical

Papers, 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.

Notes:
(1) See also the papers in this volume by Brock, Scanlon, and Sen, and the
comments by Griffin (on Brock) and Sen (on Bliss). For related philosophical
discussion, see Sen and Williams (1982), Sen (1980, 1985, 1987), Williams
(1973, 1985), and Wiggins (1987).

(2) Notice, however, that the conception of natural science employed here is not
above reproach: see below, and Putnam's paper in this volume; also Putnam
(1981).

(3) See, for example, Foucault (1984), discussed in my paper in this volume.

(4) For a variant of this approach in literary theory, see Derrida (1976, 1979),
Fish (1980, 1985); in legal studies, see Fish (1982), and many others. In the
development context, a related approach is powerfully presented in Marglin and

Page 11 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

Marglin (1990). A number of these writers have been influenced by R. Rorty

(1979, 1982).

(5) Views with which Taylor's might be fruitfully compared include those of
Putnam (1981, 1987), Davidson (1984), and, in literary theory, Wayne Booth
(1988). For a related discussion of the law, which makes a powerful case for a
richer descriptive language, see White (1989); the implications of Booth's work
for legal studies are discussed in Nussbaum (1988), repr. in Nussbaum (1990).

(6) Taylor (1964).

(7) Taylor (1985a, 1985b).

(8) See also Taylor (1989). a major philosophical account of the development of
modern conceptions of the self.

(9) See, for example, my criticism of Fish in Nussbaum (1985), repr. in

Nussbaum (1990).

(10) See the illuminating account of Socratic procedure in Vlastos (1983).

(11) The case for such language in the law is powerfully made in White (1989), a
critical review of Posner (1988); White contrasts the language of literature with
the language characteristic of much of economics. The case for the use of
literary language in moral reflection is made in Nussbaum (1990); see also
Nussbaum and Sen (1989).

(12) See Sen (1985: app. B).

(13) See especially the treatises ‘On the Art’ and ‘On Ancient Medicine’; some of
the relevant issues are discussed in Nussbaum (1986; ch. 4).

(14) Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, line 459.

(15) Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, I. 1.

(16) The History of Sexuality, for example, relies above all on Plato and
Xenophon–both philosophers and both from wealthy oligarchic backgrounds.
Both are extremely unrepresentative of popular thought.

(17) See Nussbaum and Sen (1989).

(18) Taylor (1989) is therefore especially to be welcomed, since its dense and
complex historical account lays out the issues with a fullness impossible in the
shorter papers.

(19) See Williams (1981) for one forceful argument along these lines.

Page 12 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022
Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reason

(20) I am using ‘emotions’ and ‘passions’ interchangeably; both words are

historically well entrenched, and both have, for many centuries, been used more
or less interchangeably to designate a species of which the most important
members are anger, fear, grief, pity, love and joy.

(21) See Nussbaum (1987, 1989a, 1989b).

(22) Aspects of it are being powerfully defended in several fields, including

philosophy, cognitive psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and legal
studies: see Nussbaum (1990) for discussion and references, and see especially
Lutz (1988), A. Rorty (1980, 1988), and de Sousa (1987).

Page 13 of 13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal
use.date: 08 April 2022