Law School Press Releases

Northwestern Law Professor, Charles Taylor, Awarded Templeton Prize

March 15, 2007

Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University, has won the 2007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities.

Awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Prize is the world's largest annual monetary award. The 2007 prize, valued at $1.5 million, will be officially awarded to Taylor by HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 2.

Taylor holds a joint appointment as a professor of law at the School of Law and as a professor of philosophy at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. Prior to joining Northwestern, he taught in the political science and philosophy departments at McGill University.

An internationally renowned political philosopher, Taylor has argued for more than half a century that both secular and spiritual dimensions must be considered to solve problems such as violence and bigotry.

The role of spiritual thinking in the 21st century is central to Taylor's work. He argues that depending solely on secularized viewpoints to understand complex problems prevents crucial insights that might help a global community increasingly exposed to clashes of culture, morality, nationalities and religions.

Taylor spoke of the urgent need for insight into the human propensity for violence during a press conference announcing his prize in New York March 14. Such an understanding must take "a full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion," he said.

Barriers between the secular and the spiritual are ungrounded, and one without the other can lead to peril, according to Taylor. "The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both," he said. Equally true, he stressed, the culture of the humanities and social sciences also has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual.

By denying the full account of how and why humans strive for meaning, he noted in his talk, it is impossible to solve the world's most intractable problems, ranging from mob violence to racism to war. The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual greatly affects the culture of the media and of educated public opinion in general, he said.

Taylor also pointed out the need to understand the use of moral certitude or religious beliefs in justifying righteous violence and religious dynamics that become the basis of quasi-nationalist political mobilization. Neither those on the spiritual side of the divide or those on the secular side, regardless of beliefs, are immune from being recruited to group violence. He suggested that the benefits as well as dangers of religious dynamics need to be understood in a way that the old framework of secularization hid from sight.

The first Canadian to win the Templeton Prize, Taylor recently was appointed by Jean Charest, the premier of Quebec, to co-chair a commission on accommodation of cultural religious differences in public life. He said that he will use the prize money to advance his studies of the relationship of language and linguistic meaning to art and theology and to develop new concepts of relating human sciences with biological sciences.

Taylor is author of more than a dozen books and scores of published essays. He is currently working on topics in social and political theory having to do with multiculturalism, secularization and alternative modernities. He has a strong interest in the role of law in political theory, and his work covers topics including the history of philosophy, truth, theism, interpretation, the human sciences, liberalism, pluralism and difference. He has studied and written about the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, the modern understanding of the self and the philosophy of Hegel.

In 1992 the Quebec provincial government awarded Professor Taylor the Prix Léon-Gérin, the highest honor given for contribution to Quebec intellectual life, and in 2000 he was named a grand officer de l'Ordre national du Quebec. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the British Academy and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Taylor holds a bachelor of arts degree from McGill University, as well as a master's degree and Ph.D. (D.Phil.) from Oxford University. The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life's biggest questions. These questions range from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity.

The full meda release is available online.