Charles Taylor, in conversation with Ronald A. Kuipers, in part II of a three part interview for The Other Journal:
You see I have an unfortunate way of writing that I don’t know how to change [laughter], because the nature of that book and other books of mine is that I take people through a lot of very different positions and try to explain each position. It gets to be very wearisome to say, “according to x, according to x, according to x,” and so I tend to swing into a position, and I assume my reader understands that I am now working out a certain position, and I then begin to use the rhetoric of those people in that position in order to get a sense of the logical sense of it. Now, if you don’t read the whole book—I mean it’s obvious to me that the guy who wrote the New York Times book review simply turned to page 25 and page 375 and then closed the book. And he happened to hit a sentence that was describing some position that wasn’t mine, but he attributed it to me. Now, if you just take a sentence out of the middle of the page, that’s an easy mistake to make. I think that’s one of the things that has always happened to me.
Read part I of the interview here. And read part II here.
