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Charles Taylor, Mikhail Epstein and ‘minimal religion’

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-02-27, 14:52 authored by Ian Fraser
In A Secular Age Charles Taylor endorses Mikhail Epstein’s notion of ‘minimal religion’ as his preferred orientation to the good for Western secular society. This article examines the basis of Epstein’s ‘minimal religion’ which rests on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It is shown that Freud’s theories are incompatible with Taylor’s own thought, and in the case of Jung, Epstein fails to develop the latter’s contribution to our understanding of religion. Moreover, although Taylor endorses Epstein’s work he makes no reference to Jung. To this end, the importance of Jung’s theories in relation to religion are elucidated and offered as a way to forge a dialogue between a nuanced humanist position and the theistic vision offered by Taylor.

History

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Volume

77

Pages

159 - 178

Citation

FRASER, I., 2015. Charles Taylor, Mikhail Epstein and ‘minimal religion’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 77 (2), pp.159-178

Publisher

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-01-12

Publication date

2015-01-26

Notes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9508-3

ISSN

0020-7047

eISSN

1572-8684

Language

  • en

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