Charles Taylor
What is Modernity?
Intro
Charles Taylor is one of the most popular and influential contemporary Canadian philosophers. His career is dedicated to understanding how we form our identities and conceptions of what it means to be human. He has produced an extensive body of work that draws upon the thoughts of a wide breadth of philosophers, politicians and scientists.
His historical approach to examining self-hood has revolutionized the way that people understand modern-day ideas about the ‘self’. He traces links between our ideologies today and the development of theories through centuries of civilization. Unlike many traditional economists, psychologists and politicians, who think of people as rational actors that make decisions to maximize utility, Taylor thinks that people’s behavior is reflective of their search for meaning and recognition.1
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.
– Charles Taylor, in his book Multiculturalism 2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
