Charles Taylor and dramatic narrative

If Charles Taylor had died when he was 55, after the publication of his Philosophical Papers in 1985, he would have been remembered as both a notable historian of philosophy and a major contributor to some central philosophical debates. His two books on Hegel had secured his reputation as an historian. His critiques of those projects in psychology and political science where it had been taken for granted that the methods of the natural sciences could be extended unproblematically to the social sciences together with his perceptive appropriation of insights drawn from phenomenology and hermeneutics had opened up new perspectives in the philosophy of mind and action. But with the publication of those two extraordinary narratives, Sources of the Self in 1989, and A Secular Age 18 years later, reckoning with Taylor's work became something else.