Charles Taylor The Language Animal review, recensie en informatie boek over de volledige omvang van het menselijk taalvermogen. Op 10 maart 2026 verschijnt bij Belknap Press het boek Charles Taylor de emeritus hoogleraar aan de faculteit filosofie van de McGill University. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Charles Taylor The Language Animal review en recensie

• “Just as Humboldt believed that ‘possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation, ‘ Charles Taylor’s new book, The Language Animal, demonstrates how the very study of language over time embodies the evolving human effort to extend our understanding–not only of language, but of the very self language helps to describe, propel, and transcend. It is a deeply thoughtful, historically enriching, and ultimately luminous book.” (Maryanne Wolf, Tufts University)
• “There is no other book that has presented a critique of conventional philosophy of language in these terms and constructed an alternative to it in anything like this way.” (Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University)
• “Taylor is one of the handful of most important thinkers of our era. The line of thinking he develops in The Language Animal is basic to his whole work since Explanation of Behaviour. Many readers will grasp the importance of a constitutive view of language, and for them this will be a landmark book.” (Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science)

The Language Animal

The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity

• Auteur: Charles Taylor (Canada)
• Soort boek: filosofisch taalkundig boek
• Taal: Engels
• Uitgever: Bellknap Press
• Verschijnt: 10 maart 2026
• Omvang: 368 pagina’s
• Uitgave: paperback / ebook
• Prijs:
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol

Flaptekst van het boek over de linguïstieke capaciteit van de mens

In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process.

For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation.

Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

Charles Taylor is born on 5 november 1931 ub Montreal, Canada. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, The Explanation of Behavior and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order of Canada.

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