“We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human.” —John Cottingham, The Tablet

In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, individually and as a society. The Language Animal examines the foundation of this generative process.

For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Rational empiricists—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool to encode and communicate information. Yet this view neglects language’s crucial role in shaping the thought it expresses. Taylor argues that language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning. Nor is linguistic capacity innately possessed. We learn language from others, and our individual selves emerge from 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, metaphors, tones of voice, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. 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 human.

"Characteristically, [Taylor’s] latest book transgresses the boundaries of usually distinct philosophical topics, incorporating disciplines outside philosophy: anthropology, sociology and developmental psychology. Philosophy of language becomes the doorway to metaphysics, politics and ethics, and to working out the nature of modernity and what it has made us." - Times Higher Education

"Taylor moves well beyond theory, looking at the ‘shape, scope and uses of language.’ We find out a great deal about how language is learned, semantic invention, and how words fit into the broader palette of art, ritual, gesture and symbol." - Catholic Herald

"Taylor’s argument is salutary and powerful. His erudition is impressive, and the rich diet of examples he assembles poses a serious challenge to facile reductionist accounts of language and of human nature." - National Review

"Taylor’s prolific philosophical output is justly celebrated for the rich historical sweep of its learning…The Language Animal…is no exception…By the end we have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human." - The Tablet

"True to its author’s background in philosophy and political thought, The Language Animal is less a scientific, by-the-facts book than a reflective and often poetic account of how language shapes human experience." - LSE Review of Books

"[Taylor’s] ultimate objective in his latest book, The Language Animal, is to demonstrate how we can all live in a more tolerant ‘flexible’ (his word) world—if we can learn how to make the most of the resources, above all the resources for communication, we all share. This is a continuation of the ideas he has been working on throughout his astonishingly long and productive career. Taylor writes in a compelling, congenial way that enables him to encompass seeming contradictions." - World Post