Taylor and Hermeneutics
Concurrent to Taylor’s critique of naturalism was his development of an alternative. Indeed, Taylor’s mature philosophy begins when as a doctoral student at Oxford he turned away, disappointed from analytic philosophy in search of other philosophical resources which he found in French and German hermeneutic and phenomenology.
The hermeneutic tradition develops a view of human understanding and cognition as centered on the decipherment of meanings (as opposed to, say, foundational theories of brute verification or an apodictic rationalism). Taylor’s own philosophical outlook can broadly and fairly be characterized as hermeneutic. This is clear not only in his championing of the works of major figures within the hermeneutic tradition like Dilthey, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and Gadamer. It is also evident in his own original contributions to hermeneutic and interpretive theory.
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