The Malaise of Modernity

The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) program Ideas just posted a five part radio series/podcast of interviews with the philosopher Charles Taylor. So far I have only listened to the first three episodes, all of which have been excellent. There is a lot of interesting stuff about the culture of analytic philosophy at Oxford in the 1950s and Taylor’s discovery of phenomenology through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

In the first episode there is a discussion that made me think a lot about information literacy. Taylor argues that much what we know is learned through experience and engagement with the world, not through the creation of abstract categories within our minds. I find that it is important to remember this when teaching information literacy sessions. For example, I can talk until I am blue in the face about what peer-review is. However, students are not going to get a feel for the norms of academic discourse until they interact with and read a lot of texts. In other words, the nature of a scholarly source is not apparent until you interact with it.

Taylor is now on my summer reading list. I will probably be the only one on the beach kicking back with a copy of The Malaise of Modernity.

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