NEW YORK - Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who says the world's problems can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual roots, was named Wednesday as the recipient of a religion award billed as the world's richest annual prize.

Taylor, a professor of law and philosophy at Northwestern University, has won this year's Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. The award is worth more than US$1.5 million.

In a career spanning more than four decades, Taylor, 75, has investigated a wide range of issues, including how it is that the search for meaning and spiritual direction can end in violence. He contends that relying only on secular analyses of human behaviour leads to faulty conclusions.

"I believe that the barriers between science and spirituality are not only ungrounded, but are also crippling,'' Taylor said. "The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both, but it is equally true that the culture of the humanities and social sciences has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual.''

Taylor, a Montreal native, is professor emeritus in the McGill University political science department and a Rhodes Scholar who earned his doctorate from Oxford. He is the author of more than a dozen books.

They include "Hegel'' (1975), an introduction to Hegel's philosophy; "Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity'' (1989), described by the Templeton Prize as "an attempt to create a philosophically informed reflection on history''; "Philosophical Arguments'' (1995), a collection of papers; and "A Secular Age,'' to be published this fall.

In 1991 Taylor was CBC Radio's annual Massey lecturer. His talks were later published as "The Malaise of Modernity.''

Honoured as a companion of the Order of Canada in 1995, Taylor has taught at numerous universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; University of Oxford; Carleton University in Ottawa; Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.; University of Frankfurt; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Stanford University; and Yale University.

Taylor will receive the prize May 2 in a private ceremony at London's Buckingham Palace.

The Templeton Foundation of West Conshohocken, Pa., which sponsors various projects on science and religion, was founded by mutual funds entrepreneur Sir John M. Templeton.

The first Templeton annual award went to Mother Teresa in 1973.