Charles Taylor

One of the most important thinkers Canada has produced, Charles Taylor's writings have been translated into twenty languages and have covered a range of subjects including artificial intelligence, language, social behavior, morality and multiculturalism. A pupil of Isaiah Berlin at Oxford, Taylor taught at McGill from 1961 to 1997, and is now a professor emeritus. Taylor never hesitated to make his ideas known publicly - he ran in three federal elections, most famously against Pierre Trudeau in 1965.

Sources of the Self, his 1989 book, achieved a wide general readership. His former mentor, Isaiah Berlin, said of him, “whatever one may think of his central beliefs, [they] cannot fail to broaden the outlook of anyone who reads his works or listens to his lectures or, indeed, talks to him.”

In 2003, Taylor was awarded the first Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Gold Medal. In 2007, he was again in the public eye, this time for three different accomplishments: He received the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, the world’s largest annual monetary award for an individual; he joined forces with sociologist Gérard Bouchard to chair the high-profile Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, the Quebec government’s response to a string of controversies surrounding the “reasonable accommodation” of religious groups; and he published A Secular Age, a study of the changing place of religion in our societies, which the New York Times hailed as “a work of stupendous breadth and erudition.” In November 2008, Taylor became the first Canadian to win Japan’s Kyoto Prize for arts and philosophy, an achievement marked by a ten-day lecture tour of Japan. He is also a member of the Order of Canada. Today, Taylor continues to write and lecture extensively, especially on multiculturalism and secular society.