Charles Taylor, the award-winning Canadian philosopher‚ writer‚ and McGill University professor emeritus, has received the inaugural Berggruen Prize‚ administered by the L.A.-based Berggruen Institute in recognition of a thinker whose writings “shape human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity.” The prize carries a $1-million (U.S.) purse.
Taylor is the author of more than 15 books of philosophy‚ including A Secular Age‚ Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity‚ The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Harvard University Press), and Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Taylor will receive the prize at an event in New York on Dec. 1.