Mark C. Taylor
Encyclopedia
Mark C. Taylor is a philosopher of religion
and cultural critic who has published more than twenty books on theology, philosophy, art and architecture, media, technology, economics, and the natural sciences. After graduating from Wesleyan University
in 1968, he received his doctorate in the study of religion from Harvard University
and began teaching at Williams College
in 1973. In 2007, Taylor moved from Williams College to Columbia University
, where he chairs the Department of Religion.
in 1975. This was followed in 1980 by the work for which Taylor received his Doctorgrad, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (University of California Press
; reissued by Fordham University Press
in 2000). Taylor's early study of Kierkegaard and Hegel forms the foundation for all his subsequent work.
In the early 1980s, Taylor began exploring the texts of Jacques Derrida
and his most important followers. Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (University of Chicago Press
, 1984) was one of the earliest attempts to study religion from the standpoint of poststructuralist philosophy and was followed by two closely related works, the sourcebook Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago,1986) and Altarity (Chicago, 1987). In 1989, Taylor founded the Religion and Postmodernism series at the University of Chicago Press as a forum for translations and new scholarship.
During the late 1980s, Taylor was drawn into debates about architecture and the visual arts, and in 1992 published a theological study of religious twentieth-century visual arts, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture and Religion. In later essays and books, Taylor considers a broad range of artists: Mark Tansey
, Michael Heizer
, Richard Serra
, Fred Sandback
, Ann Hamilton, Joseph Beuys
and others. His extensive work on architecture includes essays on Peter Eisenman
, Bernard Tschumi
, Daniel Liebeskind, Robert Venturi
, Frank Gehry
, and Frank Lloyd Wright
.
While writing on the visual arts, Taylor became interested in media and new information technologies. In 1992 he and Esa Saarinen
, a Finnish philosopher, taught the first global seminar using teleconferencing technology. Their book, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (Routledge
, 1994) grew out of this seminar. The book's unusual design in turn inspired the Finnish design company, Marimekko
, to develop a product line derived from pages of the book. Taylor’s subsequent book, Hiding (Chicago, 1997), extended the use of graphic design to create hypertextual effects within the limits of a conventional bound book. As a companion to Hiding, Taylor and José Marquez issued a CD-ROM video game entitled The Réal – Las Vegas, Nevada.
While Taylor was exploring art and new media, he extended his experiments with technology in the classroom. In 1993 he was awarded the Rector’s Medal by the University of Helsinki
and in 1995 the Carnegie Foundation
named him the national Professor of the Year for his innovative teaching. In 1998, Taylor and New York investment banker Herbert Allen, Jr., founded Global Education Network, whose mission was to provide high-quality, low-cost online education in the liberal arts, humanities, and sciences.
Taylor’s work with technology led to a growing interest in the expanding fields of network theory and scientific studies of complex adaptive systems. In a series of books--The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (Chicago, 1999), The Moment of Complexity (Chicago, 2001), and Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago, 2004)--Taylor deploys complexity theory to explore a range of social, cultural and economic developments.
Taylor’s interest in the visual arts and graphic design has led to his own artistic experiments. In Grave Matters (Reaktion, 2002), Taylor and Dietrich Christian Lammerts collaborated on a book featuring Lammerts's photographs of the graves of one hundred and fifty modern writers, theologians, philosophers, artists and architects. In 2003, Taylor expanded this project beyond the format of the book to create an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
, which included not only the photographs but also sculpture and video art. In 2006, Taylor published Mystic Bones, featuring forty of Taylor's own photographs of deer, cattle and elk bones, accompanied by aphorisms and an essay, "Rubbings of Reality," on the place of deserts in the imagination.
Taylor's work attempts to give sustained attention to the theological, philosophical, and artistic issues that were framed in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taylor's After God, published in the fall of 2007 (University of Chicago Press
), weaves together the many strands of his oeuvre.
On August 31, 2010, Taylor published Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, ISBN 0307593290), in which he identified and analyzed major problems facing higher education.
In addition to his own writing, Taylor has been involved in a number of editorial projects. In the late 1970s, he chaired the Research and Publications Committee of the American Academy of Religion
, which initiated a series of major publishing programs. The Religion and Postmodernism book series he founded continues at the University of Chicago Press under the editorship of Thomas A. Carlson. Taylor has also edited a textbook, Critical Terms for the Study of Religion (Chicago, 1998), designed for college courses on method in religious studies.
, University of North Carolina
, and University of Sydney
. After being a visiting professor of religion and architecture at Columbia University, he joined the faculty there full time in 2007 as chair of the religion department.
. When Derrida died on October 8, 2004, the New York Times published a highly critical obituary of the philosopher. Taylor felt that the obituary was not an accurate reflection of Derrida, and proceeded to write another obituary, which the Times published a few days later.
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...
and cultural critic who has published more than twenty books on theology, philosophy, art and architecture, media, technology, economics, and the natural sciences. After graduating from Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
in 1968, he received his doctorate in the study of religion from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and began teaching at Williams College
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams. Originally a men's college, Williams became co-educational in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this...
in 1973. In 2007, Taylor moved from Williams College to Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where he chairs the Department of Religion.
Work
Taylor's first book, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self was published by Princeton University PressPrinceton University Press
-Further reading:* "". Artforum International, 2005.-External links:* * * * *...
in 1975. This was followed in 1980 by the work for which Taylor received his Doctorgrad, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (University of California Press
University of California Press
University of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
; reissued by Fordham University Press
Fordham University Press
The Fordham University Press is a publishing house, a division of Fordham University, that publishes primarily in the humanities and the social sciences...
in 2000). Taylor's early study of Kierkegaard and Hegel forms the foundation for all his subsequent work.
In the early 1980s, Taylor began exploring the texts of Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
and his most important followers. Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, 1984) was one of the earliest attempts to study religion from the standpoint of poststructuralist philosophy and was followed by two closely related works, the sourcebook Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago,1986) and Altarity (Chicago, 1987). In 1989, Taylor founded the Religion and Postmodernism series at the University of Chicago Press as a forum for translations and new scholarship.
During the late 1980s, Taylor was drawn into debates about architecture and the visual arts, and in 1992 published a theological study of religious twentieth-century visual arts, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture and Religion. In later essays and books, Taylor considers a broad range of artists: Mark Tansey
Mark Tansey
Mark Tansey is an American postmodern painter best known for monochromatic works, elaborate paintings incorporating hidden text, images and symbols and his invented "color wheel" approach to painting, in which a large, wooden wheel consisting of three rows of ambiguous words is spun—the results...
, Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer is a contemporary artist specializing primarily in large-scale sculptures and earth art .Heizer was born in Berkeley, California in 1944; and he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Traveling to New York City in 1966, he began his career producing more conventional, small-scale...
, Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
, Fred Sandback
Fred Sandback
Fred Sandback was a minimalist conceptual-based sculptor known for his yarn sculptures, drawings, and prints.-Life and work:...
, Ann Hamilton, Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
and others. His extensive work on architecture includes essays on Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman is an American architect. Eisenman's professional work is often referred to as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high modernist, etc...
, Bernard Tschumi
Bernard Tschumi
Bernard Tschumi is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Born of French and Swiss parentage, he works and lives in New York and Paris. He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969...
, Daniel Liebeskind, Robert Venturi
Robert Venturi
Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. is an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major figures in the architecture of the twentieth century...
, Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions...
, and Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...
.
While writing on the visual arts, Taylor became interested in media and new information technologies. In 1992 he and Esa Saarinen
Esa Saarinen
Esa Saarinen is a Finnish philosopher who is currently professor of applied philosophy at Aalto University and co-director of the Systems Intelligence Research Group....
, a Finnish philosopher, taught the first global seminar using teleconferencing technology. Their book, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (Routledge
Routledge
Routledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
, 1994) grew out of this seminar. The book's unusual design in turn inspired the Finnish design company, Marimekko
Marimekko
Marimekko is a Finnish company based in Helsinki that has made important contributions to fashion, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. They are particularly noted for brightly-colored printed fabrics and simple styles, used both in women's garments and in home furnishings.- Foundation :Marimekko was...
, to develop a product line derived from pages of the book. Taylor’s subsequent book, Hiding (Chicago, 1997), extended the use of graphic design to create hypertextual effects within the limits of a conventional bound book. As a companion to Hiding, Taylor and José Marquez issued a CD-ROM video game entitled The Réal – Las Vegas, Nevada.
While Taylor was exploring art and new media, he extended his experiments with technology in the classroom. In 1993 he was awarded the Rector’s Medal by the University of Helsinki
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki is a university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but was founded in the city of Turku in 1640 as The Royal Academy of Turku, at that time part of the Swedish Empire. It is the oldest and largest university in Finland with the widest range of disciplines available...
and in 1995 the Carnegie Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding," is one of the oldest, largest and most influential of American foundations...
named him the national Professor of the Year for his innovative teaching. In 1998, Taylor and New York investment banker Herbert Allen, Jr., founded Global Education Network, whose mission was to provide high-quality, low-cost online education in the liberal arts, humanities, and sciences.
Taylor’s work with technology led to a growing interest in the expanding fields of network theory and scientific studies of complex adaptive systems. In a series of books--The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (Chicago, 1999), The Moment of Complexity (Chicago, 2001), and Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago, 2004)--Taylor deploys complexity theory to explore a range of social, cultural and economic developments.
Taylor’s interest in the visual arts and graphic design has led to his own artistic experiments. In Grave Matters (Reaktion, 2002), Taylor and Dietrich Christian Lammerts collaborated on a book featuring Lammerts's photographs of the graves of one hundred and fifty modern writers, theologians, philosophers, artists and architects. In 2003, Taylor expanded this project beyond the format of the book to create an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, commonly referred to as MASS MoCA, is a museum in a converted factory building located in North Adams, Massachusetts, USA. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the country.MASS MoCA opened with 19...
, which included not only the photographs but also sculpture and video art. In 2006, Taylor published Mystic Bones, featuring forty of Taylor's own photographs of deer, cattle and elk bones, accompanied by aphorisms and an essay, "Rubbings of Reality," on the place of deserts in the imagination.
Taylor's work attempts to give sustained attention to the theological, philosophical, and artistic issues that were framed in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taylor's After God, published in the fall of 2007 (University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
), weaves together the many strands of his oeuvre.
On August 31, 2010, Taylor published Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, ISBN 0307593290), in which he identified and analyzed major problems facing higher education.
In addition to his own writing, Taylor has been involved in a number of editorial projects. In the late 1970s, he chaired the Research and Publications Committee of the American Academy of Religion
American Academy of Religion
The American Academy of Religion is the world's largest association of scholars in the field of religious studies and related topics. It is a nonprofit member association,...
, which initiated a series of major publishing programs. The Religion and Postmodernism book series he founded continues at the University of Chicago Press under the editorship of Thomas A. Carlson. Taylor has also edited a textbook, Critical Terms for the Study of Religion (Chicago, 1998), designed for college courses on method in religious studies.
Criticisms
Taylor achieved notoriety outside academe in 2009 with an NYT op-ed piece entitled "End the University As We Know It" (Apr. 27), in which he advocated the end of tenure and academic departments. He followed it up quickly with a book in which he expanded on his reform scheme, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010). Critics accused Taylor of hypocrisy, writing as a tenured Columbia professor drawing annual salary and benefits estimated at over $200,000, and charged him, after a career spent in elite private colleges, of being out of touch with the work loads and pay packets of faculty at non-elite institutions. Reviewer David Bell wrote of Taylor's book, "Its logic is fragile and its evidence is thin," and called it "unbelievably misguided," mocking Taylor's "enraptured" invocation of interdisciplinarity and conflation of "forms of communication and forms of knowledge."Positions
Taylor began teaching at Williams College in 1973 and at the time of his departure in 2007 was Cluett Professor of Humanities. He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Smith CollegeSmith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
, University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
, and University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
. After being a visiting professor of religion and architecture at Columbia University, he joined the faculty there full time in 2007 as chair of the religion department.
Trivia
Mark Taylor was a close friend of Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
. When Derrida died on October 8, 2004, the New York Times published a highly critical obituary of the philosopher. Taylor felt that the obituary was not an accurate reflection of Derrida, and proceeded to write another obituary, which the Times published a few days later.
See also
- DeconstructionDeconstructionDeconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
- Deconstruction-and-religionDeconstruction-and-religionThose that take a deconstructive approach to religion identify closely with the work of Jacques Derrida, especially his work later in life. According to Slavoj Žižek, in the mid-to-late 1980s Derrida's work shifted from constituting a radical negative theology to being a form of Kantian idealism....
- List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
- List of American philosophers
External links
- Mark C. Taylor's faculty page at Columbia University
- Mark C. Taylor's personal website
- 2008 Interview with Mark C. Taylor at Religion Dispatches
- Mark C. Taylor's January 2007 essay, "Religious Correctness"
- Network culture timeline, by Mark C. Taylor
- Except from The Moment of Complexity
- 2005 Interview with Roy Christopher
- Mark C. Taylor's September 2001 essay "Awe and Anxiety" (about 9/11)
- Mark C. Taylor interviewed by Buck Tampa (José Marquez) about Hiding