Uplifting Unbelief

This article analyses three of Taylor’s principal theoretical moves: his basic account of secularity and related rejection of secularist ‘subtraction stories’; his comprehension of historico-empirical realities in the light of a sort of philosophy of history; and his presentation of the transcendental quality of the experience of ‘fullness’. Motivated to contest Taylor’s framing of the ‘unbeliever’ as spirituality deprived and intellectually complacent, the coherence, content and rhetorical overkill of his argumentation in each of these areas is questioned. Keywords: post-secularity; rhetoric; subtraction stories; transcendence; unbelievers