Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor
Published 1989 · 200,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity to read?
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity scores 70 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Philosophical vocabulary requiring familiarity with moral philosophy.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- High-level philosophical and historical analysis of moral ontology.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Dense intellectual history across two millennia of thought.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Historical narrative in service of philosophical argument.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Analytical rather than symbolic; metaphors used sparingly.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Earnest philosophical investigation without satirical distance.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The sources of the self are identified; prescriptions are restrained.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Five parts, twenty-five chapters tracing identity from antiquity to modernity.
How Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is regarded
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.