Educated at Oxford in the closing days of the great European idealist movement, Taylor was early influenced by the school of British idealism, especially neo-Hegelianism.

[4][6] His first major book, Elements of Metaphysics (1903), dedicated (in heartfelt acknowledgment) to F. H. Bradley, is a systematic treatise of metaphysics covering such topics as ontology, cosmology, and rational psychology, and influenced by scholars including Josiah Royce, James Ward, George Frederick Stout, Richard Avenarius, and Hugo Munsterberg, as well as Robert Adamson, Wilhelm Ostwald, Bertrand Russell, and even Louis Couturat.

"[12] This paper, as Stuart Brown notes, "advanced the bold thesis that Hobbes’s ethical theory is logically independent of the egoistic psychology and is a strict deontology.

[15] As a scholar of Plato, he is perhaps most famous for, from his Varia Socratica (1911) onwards, presenting evidence in support of the position that the vast majority of the statements of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues accurately depict ideas of the historical man himself.

Taylor was greatly influenced by the thought of classical antiquity, by such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, as well as medieval scholasticism.