Taylor was educated at McGill University and Oxford, where he gained his PhD in 1961, and where he has also taught. A wide-ranging philosopher, Taylor has written extensively on ethics, politics, and the social sciences. A Roman Catholic, he opposes any naturalistic or scientific approach to humanity, substituting instead a moral and spiritual centrality that has been lost by modernity. His most influential book is Sources of the Self (1989), a criticism of Enlightenment views of the self which stand in the way of our understanding our experience as moral agents. Like Macintyre, Taylor draws on Aristotelian and communitarian themes to rectify the deficiencies of modernism. His work has harvested the rewards foundations give to recognize the priority of spiritual over merely monetary values: a Templeton prize in 2007 ($1.5 million) and the Kyoto prize in 2008 (approx. $.5 million) Other works include Hegel (1975) and The Ethics of Authenticity (1991).